Re: Shortened titles in Yelp

[Martijn van Beers <martijn eekeek org>]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 01:08:41AM +0100, Sander Vesik wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, Martijn van Beers wrote:

> Its not a question of 'is able to'. The thing rendered is just a string
> and it doesn't have a limit, really long ones just won't look nice

Doesn't look nice isn't an argument to go change a metadata format. And
since you can't control every OMF file, you'll never get all of them to
follow your definition of 'looks nice' anyway

> and the
> present titles contain information that is pretty useless to a user of the
> desktop
the original example 'problem' title is:
	GNOME Calculator Manual V2.0
and the proposal is to shorten this to
	Calculator

I don't see any information in this that is pretty useless to a user of
a linux desktop. He certainly would want to know this is the manual, and
not the manpage document for the same application that happens to be on
his system too. Nor does he want to miss that this is the gnome
calculator, instead of the kde one that he has installed too.

The only problematic bit about this title is the V2.0 bit. But that
isn't redundant either, just unclear. What is version 2.0 here? Is it
a new version of the manual, or does the manual describe a certain
version of the gnome calculator?

> Hence the problem to be solved - how
> do we make sure OMF files contain a title that help browser developers can
> use without a fear of getting bugs files against them or confusing users.
> The easiest way is to just put the short title in <title>...</title> and
> put teh long one somewhere else (like the description field), but as
> noted, that has its own drawbacks.

No, this is not the problem to be solved. OMF files contain metadata
about a document. title is metadata. author is metadata. but
title butchered up so that a certain obscure html renderer can display
it according to certain people's aesthetic taste is definitely not.


Martijn