[RFC] Online Help Systems

[Sean Wheller]

On Friday 14 January 2005 16:44, John Levin wrote:
> 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?

I am on it with Shaum the lead developer of yelp. He acknowledges the 
problems, but does not have solutions at present. In addition he faces two 
constraints:
1. Lack of developers.
2. Acceptance by distro communities.

There is a need for some FreeDesktop.org action in this issue.

>
> 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

Under KDE it's not a problem, KHelpCenter is X/HTML friendly and has the bells 
and whistles for integration.

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

yes, yes, yes. :;-)

IMHO, the best solution is an app based on firefox. Just customize it around 
help. Using mono would also be a good direction.

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

Agreed.

-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
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