[RFC] Online Help Systems

[John Levin]

On 11 Jan 2005, at 10:44, Sean Wheller wrote:

> Hello,
>
> As we all know many people are targeting yelp/scrollkeeper as 
> technologies by
> which users will be able to access the Ubuntu Documents. This is fine 
> for now
> since Ubuntu currently only ships a GNOME Desktop. However, I doubt it 
> will
> always remain this way and wish to warn against lockin to the GNOME 
> Help
> system. My reasoning follows, I would appreciate thoughts, feedback or
> possible solutions I may have overlooked.
>

<snip interesting post>

I pretty much agree with Sean Wheller's analysis and conclusions; we 
shouldn't be locked in to Yelp, chunked X/HTML is the way to go.

I don't know much about Yelp, but the criticisms Sean makes strike me 
as being bug reports - perhaps this should be pursued upstream?

Also, we need to consider how documentation (the ubuntu manual) relates 
to presentation (help application(s) like Yelp). The great thing about 
HTML is that it is easy to parse and reuse. However, some sort of 
meta-structure is very useful; a single interface for all the 
documentation

Do we want a Ubuntu doc-presenting application that would be sytem wide 
and not restricted to Gnome? (And portable to other Linuxes.)

(I know this is not going to be done in time for Hoary, but it should 
be considered as a long-term goal.)

John