Re: "What's this"

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Lubos Lunak <l lunak sh cvut cz> writes:

> Dne so 5. květen 2001 00:29 jste napsal(a):
> > Cristian Tibirna <tibirna kde org> writes:
> > > Isn't this in the new NET spec already?
> >
> > I don't believe so, as Elliot says.
> >
> > I'm thinking of a protocol to do it; either a simple one so you could
> > click ? on a window and get help for stuff inside that window
> > (relatively easy) or a more complex thing so you can get help anywhere
> > on the screen. I'm not sure which one Windows has, actually.
> 
>  Win2k has 'what's this' only for the active window, the same way it's in 
> KDE/Qt ( which is IMHO good enough ).

Considering that:

 - "What's this" needs to be activated at least from the window
   manager title bar.

 - "What's this" needs to work across embedded subwindows.

I don't think you get any essential simplification in implementation
from allowing it only in a single window.

And I think it's easy to do better than Windows in this respect:

 - Provide "what's this" globally, and in particular on desktop
   features such as the taskbar and desktop icons.

 - Provide feedback during the "what's this operation".
   (Having to guess what has help, and then restart the operation
   is the thing I found most annoying trying out this feature
   in Windows.)

(The simplest feedback is simply a yes/no indication as in DND. 
This is easy to implement and easy to standardize.

I suspect it's possible to do better than this, either by providing
some visual clue as to what elements have help, or by displaying the
help immediately on mouse-over; but I'm not sure that the extra
complexity would be worth it.)

Regards,
                                        Owen