Re: "What's this"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us writes: 
> Clients should not be bothered with displaying help, unless you want to
> bloat all of them with basically identical help rendering code.

The code will be in toolkits, e.g. GTK, Qt. So there's no bloat issue.

There are two problems with the approach you mention:

 - people want something higher-level than text in the help, 
   e.g. a simple HTML-like subset with links, etc.

 - help needs to work within a client even if no "help manager" app is
   running; i.e. the client needs a fallback implementation in any
   case, it can't rely on a desktop runtime environment being active.
   So you can't eliminate the toolkit code in any case. (And Qt
   already has this code, anyhow.)

man pages certainly aren't the kind of help we're discussing here;
what's this help is just a paragraph on the specific widget that's
been clicked. Sort of longer tooltips, maybe with embedded links to
the full documentation for the app.

Havoc