Re: "What's this"

[Michael Rogers <mrogers cs ucl ac uk>]

On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 08:56:29AM -0500, Sasha_Vasko osca state mo us wrote:
> You cannot install new cursor since help client has an active grab on the
> pointer at the moment

Sorry, I didn't realise (although that makes sense now I think about it!). 
Maybe XDnD is the best way to do it then.

> Still, just as a general idea, think about it: wouldnot that be nice if 
> there was a single app that could have given you a help on each and 
> every client/widget on the desktop in some standard view, no matter if 
> the widget is from GTK or from KDE or other place ? Maybe not exactly 
> a "Whats this" feature - sort of like man page browser only smart 
> enough to query what text should be displayed from the client window by 
> itself - with no user typing in a name to look up.

But Gnome and KDE would create their own implementations so you would 
still have the problem of choosing which one to launch! :) 

We should provide a way for the user to choose which app will be used to 
display help, in a way that any desktop environment or WM can understand. 
The user gets the "standard view", and the DEs get to bitch about who 
provides the best help browser. :)

One possibility is to use ~/.mime.types - the user can choose which app 
should handle the content type x-documentation/man, for example, and when 
an app wants to display a man page it can launch the program that's 
registered to handle that MIME type. You would have different MIME types 
for different types of documentation (x-documentation/info, 
x-documentation/html, x-documentation/plain), which might point to the 
same versatile help browser or to standalone viewers.

Michael