Context sensitive mallard topic display

[Shaun McCance]

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 16:36 +0200, Kyle Nitzsche wrote:
> 
> 
> I think this shows it is quite doable. It would be easy to add a help
> button to 
> any bit of a GUI that would display the related mallard topic when
> clicked.
> 
> Note that yelp is launched as a separate process, so you can:
>   * click the "?" button to display the help topic
>   * close the app (and the help topic continues to display)
> 
> Something along these lines would probably be quite beneficial to
> users. Imagine 
> a tricky dialog with lots of options or that is confusing. Someday
> developers 
> and designers will make it so clean and clear that no help will be
> necessary. 
> But imagine for now, it confuses people. Add a help button that
> launches yelp to 
> display the appropriate topic. 

I think we're conflating two different ideas here. You're talking
about having a help button go to a specific page. That's absolutely
doable, and we've been doing it for years. Click some help buttons
in Nautilus and see where they go.

To make that case better, I've been working on a help API for GLib
and GTK+. The idea is that an application actually knows about the
topics in its help. It would create help buttons with tags (rather
than full URIs with page IDs). It's then up to the help authors to
tag their topics. Menus and buttons are populated automatically with
the matching topics.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2011-April/msg00141.html

I think what Jim was referring to was the conditional processing work.
Using run-time conditional processing, application held could actually
display different content based on things like whether it's running
under Unity or GNOME Shell. There's already experimental support for
this in Yelp git master.

--
Shaun