Re: Controlling 3rd-party content in Mallard

[Milo Casagrande <miloc gnome org>]

Hi,

2010/1/23 Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>:
> We've been discussing Mallard quite heavily on the Ubuntu Docs list over
> the past week. One issue that came up (via Kyle Nitzsche, see his
> original message here [1]) is that people could install their own pages
> in the same directory as the official Ubuntu documentation.

Probably I'm not getting the Real problem here, but this looks more
like a packaging problem to me.
And I think that it can happen even now, Mallard or not: a bad-done
third-party package that installs something in the wrong directories
(it replaces all the xml files of a particular directory).

> In some situations this would be useful, for example when a different
> default browser is chosen. The potential for misuse is massive, though;
> third-party developers could pretty much take over the official docs if
> they wanted to, putting links to their content in irrelevant places.

I've never ventured that much into the "external" linking in Mallard,
the majority of links I've been using have a scope: the directory I'm
writing in.
I don't know how Mallard will handle, for example, a link from Empathy
to Vinagre help. I think that I can insert a link to Vinagre in
Empathy help, but that that link will not appear in the other
application help, otherwise, when I open Vinagre help, there should be
something that tells it that there's a link from Empathy to itself (to
me, it looks like a challenging question to solve).

Take for example a ghelp link in a Mallard page: if you insert a ghelp
link pointing to a Mallard document, you get to open the document you
link (same works with an old Docbook one), but the linked Mallard
document will not know which documents link to itself.

The interesting (and probably challenging) thing could be to insert a
ghelp link without specifying its text (<link>text</link> -> <link
/>), and Yelp could look up the info and title of the document from
the index.page of that document, or from the relevant information if
you are not linking the index.page, but a topic instead.

So, if third-party developers need to link some other help inside
their help, I think it will not be a big problem. The problem could
always be if they want to plug something into the existing help: they
need to know what the infrastructure is, and how it works.

Ciao.

(Those are just my personal thoughts.)

-- 
Milo Casagrande <miloc gnome org>