Re: About the Gnome Help browser

[Cristian Gafton <gafton redhat com>]

On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Marc Ewing wrote:

> the help system.  For example, before *any* URL parsing happens,
> the reference string is passed through something like
> resolveShortcuts() that rewrites "man:ls" to "file:/usr/man/man1/ls.1"
> based on its configuration and what it find on the filesystem.

What about being able to referenbce a certain node within an info
document? Something like "info:bash/Job Control" - that will take me to
the Job Control node within bash info documentation.

I don't understand why this help browser can not be extended a little to
include man: and info: - just because they are not standard nobody says
that we can not do it. And as long as standard thing are working, who will
complain and why ?

Unless you really want to make the file:// thing far smarter than it
should really be and risk running into some ugly stuff and be beaten by
our own limitations - just figure out that I have a foobar.1 file in a
directory and I want to open it to see the man _source_, not the formatted
crap, and file:// will only give me the formatted crap, because it is far
smarter than it should really be. (I know one would have 'View source'
thing, but that is not an universal answer - figure out other applications
trying to display the source file in this browser...)

Please think over before starting to enhance standard things. I'd rather
have a non-standard, working on gnome only, man: and info: prefixes, than
having a smart browser that will replace the decision making process for
me.

Cristian
--
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Cristian Gafton   --   gafton@redhat.com   --   Red Hat Software, Inc.
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 UNIX is user friendly. It's just selective about who its friends are.