Re: Shortened titles in OMFs and Yelp

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 10:51, Martijn van Beers wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 11:36:34PM +0000, Eugene O'Connor wrote:
> > Some of the document titles are quite long, and this looks quite odd
> > in Yelp. For example, in the Applications category, there is a
> > GNOME Calculator Manual V2.0 document. Pat Costello, John F and
> > Dan devised a way of using short titles in the OMF to prevent the
> > appearance of long wrapped-around manual titles, as follows:
> 
> > * Truncate the text in the <title> tags down to only the application
> >   name.
> > * Record the real title in <comment> tags just before the <title> tags,
> >   so that the real title does not get lost.
> 
> Ok, so this is completely backwards. OMF is meant to mark up metadata
> about documents. A document title is a document title. you don't change
> this just because a random help browser can't cope with the document
> title being long.

I think truncating the title in the OMF file would be a big mistake. 
When you truncate the title in the OMF file you lose valuable metadata.
This metadata is lost for any tool which parses the title of the OMF
file.  When you truncate the title in the OMF file you lose the version
information and any identifying parts which would relate the title OMF
file to the document's title.

> This is solely a Yelp problem, and it should be solved in Yelp, not
> by changing the OMF.

A better solution is to truncate the title inside Yelp.  It is Yelp's
responsibility to truncate the title if it is too long for Yelp to
display.  We shouldn't alter the underlying OMF title to accommodate
Yelp's problem with long document titles.  A lot of the long titles
mainly due to adding "GNOME" and "Manual."  These words could be
eliminated automatically by Yelp.

Eric Baudais