Re: Request for comments about Yelp (Helpbrowser)

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 07:56:02PM -0700, John Fleck wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 02:04:27AM +0100, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
[...]
> > The other thing I'd like to be discussed is what to do about man and
> > info? The problem is that some users don't know what man/info is, some
> > other users might want to browse only man or info, etc.
> > 
> > I think there are three possible solutions:
> > 
> > 1) Make them there own toplevel nodes: (as man in the help-home.html 
> >    view). This is the easiest way (as done in Nautilus today).
> > 
> > 2) Try to merge them into the rest of the documents (don't ask me how).
> >    This is probably hard to do in a good way. It is also (imho) bad 
> >    because though people don't have to care about what 'man' is the 
> >    documents will not be in the same style as the rest of the documents 
> >    which might be confusing anyway.
> > 
> > 3) Just don't show man/info and only show the documents that are in 
> >    Scrollkeeper.
> > 
> 
> I'm tempted to say have 3 (no man/info) be the default but offer a
> preferences option allowing users to choose 1 (separate man/info
> headers) instead. I expect, however, that suggestion would be
> immediately slapped down by one of the members of the usability crew,
> shouting that we should just pick the best option and go with it
> rather than tarting things up with endlessly variable preferences.
> 
> In that case, I vote for 1. 2 would definitely be unworkable, I think.

One user's perspective: I hardly used info pages before I found out that
gnome-help-browser displayed them. The default text info interface is
incredibly awkward, but being able to click around and read things in
g-h-b was nice (although a few more keyboard shortcuts would have nice,
too).

I would like to keep info and man and go for option (1).

Malcolm

-- 
No one is listening until you make a mistake.