Re: "What's this"

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Mon, 7 May 2001 Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us wrote:

> I would estimate, thou, that 95% of Unix/Linux/open source apps will
> not want to do that. It really is kinda stupid to write a man page

Applications are free to share help system solutions, but they need to do
it outside of this idea. Given that there are many other ways to use a
help system beside "what's this" kind of help, and that the "what's this"
help will need to be integrated into the other parts of the help system,
it does not make sense to involve the help display part of things in this
spec. This idea is not about specifying a common help system for
displaying help, only about one particular method of requesting help that
needs to be interoperable to benefit the user most.

> On the other hand standardizing some inferior ad-hoc solution is a
> nasty, way to go since it will provide a very limited solution (you
> don't have 2-way communications, so there is no way to find out if app
> has acknowledged request, and therefore you can't implement any
> fallback techniques ).

Cursor feedback was part of the requirements I gave. If an app doesn't
participate in that, then you can do your fallback stuff.

-- Elliot
These three lines
	are for sale
		at the rate of $50/month.