Re: Feedback about Yelp

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 11:12 -0500, Luis Felipe López Acevedo wrote:
> El dom, 15-11-2009 a las 12:55 -0600, Shaun McCance escribió:
> > The style has to depend on the current theme.  People who
> > use dark themes for accessibility reasons may find it very
> > difficult to read white-on-black.  The problem is that the
> > colors got screwed up somewhere in the last few releases.
> > I'll be working on generating colors that are suitable for
> > all themes for 3.0.
> > 
> 
> Sorry for my ignorance but why does it have to depend on the desktop
> theme? why not use a style sheet that looks the same with every desktop
> theme?

People who use High Contrast Inverse or Low Contrast use them
for a reason: they have a difficult time reading black-on-white
text.  If the help is always displayed black-on-white, it fails
to meet their accessibility needs.

> > > 3. I'd like the content and the contents bar to the right to have
> > > independent scrolling. The reason for this is that when you write a
> > > DocBook document that uses images with widths different to the
> > > recommended in GNOME-STYLE[1], and these images are at the same level of
> > > the navigation bar to the right, this bar will overlap the image.
> > 
> > I'm thinking of moving the contents back into a separate
> > sidebar for 3.0.  That's how it used to be, but we changed
> > it to try to de-emphasize the linear structure and make it
> > feel more topic-oriented.
> > 
> 
> Nice. But is it going to be located on the right side? Because I'd like
> it that way; I find it more comfortable. But you could give the option
> to move it to the left for people who like it that way.

Maybe.  I've thought about it.  I certainly prefer right
sidebars on the web.  For Yelp, a right sidebar would make
it easier to pop it on and off and resize the window with
less stuff getting shifted about.

I'm mildly concerned about user confusion.  I don't think
it's a big deal, but I'd like to run it by some people
first.

> > We're now doing topic-oriented help in Mallard, leaving
> > DocBook for documents which really are linear books and
> > articles.  So I don't see much point in treating DocBook
> > as something it's not anymore.
> > 
> 
> But Yelp will continue to support DocBook, right?

Yes, definitely.

> > > I'd also like to ask if the start page that you see when you open Yelp
> > > is writen in DocBook and where can I find it. I was trying to use the
> > > "set" element in DocBook hoping to get something similar but didn't get
> > > what I wanted.
> > 
> > The start page is currently generated inside Yelp.  It
> > scans your system for all installed documentation and
> > generated a set of TOC pages.
> > 
> > In 3.0, the start page will be the index page of the
> > Desktop Help, which will replace the User Guide.  This
> > will be a Mallard document, and downstream distributors
> > will be able to plug into it in the same ways they can
> > plug into other Mallard documents.
> > 
> 
> But is it possible to use the «set» element in DocBook documents to
> generate a page that lists the books in the set with short descriptions
> about them?

It's not out of the question to add this feature.  I'd
need to see some real use cases to make sure that I'm
correctly solving a real problem.

--
Shaun