possible documentation viewer?

[Sean Wheller]

On Friday 03 June 2005 17:37, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> So it's starting to look like we might just have a large
> misunderstanding here (at least I have misunderstood). When you say 'web
> application' you actually mean static HTML pages that sit on the user's
> machine.

Yes. At present I would like to add jscript support to these pages, but yelp 
would not support that last I tested. So I am currently going for a simple 
HTML with CSS. However, on help.u.c we will have the jscripts

> We just have to generate those to contain internal links and 
> whatever graphics we want. I've just tested this in Yelp and it works
> fine. It renders a local copy of the main Ubuntu homepage and manages
> local and external links (launched in Firefox) just fine.

Yep :-)

>
> So providing help pages in HTML that Yelp can read is something we can
> talk about. We still need to keep the layout simple though; Matthew
> Thomas had some examples of this before.

At this stage the layout has to be simple because Yelp does not support 
jscript. The image I sent you. It has a toc that is controlled by jscript and 
the related topics and related links you see on the right are also controlled 
by jscript for expand/collapse functionality.

>
> That still leaves the question of the Gnome help files, which we
> presumably want to link through to from the Ubuntu help pages. Do we
> port those over to DocBook so we can re-export them in an HTML version?

The GNOME help docs are all Docbook XML, but the GNOME team uses a limited set 
of tags and functionality provided by docbook. It suits their purposes.

I do not want to go there just as yet. I want to bite the elephant one bite at 
a time. but a solution would be to have a vendor drop of upstream docs so 
that we can create a patch that will apply custom branding. However, for now 
we do not have svn 1.1 or > and my solution to this problem requires this.

> That might be a good opportunity to add some Ubuntu branding to those.
> Is that much more trouble than exporting the Ubuntu-specific docs to
> standard Yelp-XML and linking them together that way?

The interlinking in GNOME is managed in scrollkeeper. The problem is if we 
link to a GNOME XML doc then the browser cannot show a formatted version. It 
will try to render the XML as src. Only in help does transformation on the 
fly happen. However, if we have a vendor drop it is possible to insert 
<?xsl-stylesheet proc in th eGNOME XML and have the browser do its thing, but 
then life can get complicated and I have not tought that through yet.

-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
084-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355