Re: "What's this"

[Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us]

> 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.

X Selections is the most standrad and interoperable way to implement
such things. It has been specifically designed for this purpose.

> > 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.

What cursor feedback exactly are you talking about. Care to provide some
definition ? Or did I miss something ? Besides any cursor manipulations
by client apps are highly discouraged in X.

> -- Elliot