Re: The Ultimate Help System

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Naba Kumar wrote:

> Talking big things when you don't even have a tool to browse properly man/info pages
> locally. (Or has there already been one, just let me know. I will drop the project.)
> 
> Ok, I will handle the local stuffs. Please consider the following things.
> 
> 1)  I'm going to build a Gnome Help Search Tool (GHST), that will be very smart
>     (such as remembering the recent searches in cache etc .. ), aprospos,
>     context search (??) etc etc. I've already implemented in my mind. Just
>     left to do the coding. (Implementing for online will be in the TODO list).
> 
> 2) Trouble with point #1:
>     How to display the resulting pages when the user
>     selects the search result in the list? Gnome Help Brower (GHB) seems useless
>     (try info "(libc)Variable Arguments Input",  for going directly to the info
> node).
> 
> 3) GHB seems to have bonobo (or Orbit, I'm not sure) capabilities,
>     but doesn't seem to work properly. Displaying should in the single
>    window (How to connect externally to a single GHB window?
>     I am unable to find a way or there is no way with GHB).
> 
> 4) Considering the above facts, Should I go for internal window
>     for displaying the pages?
> 
> 5) Trouble with point #4:
>     I would be reinventing many wheels which GHB has already
>     invented.
> 
> 6) Solution to point #5:
>     Make the GHST part of GHB or vise versa.
> 
> 7) Troble with point #6:
>     No, componentization will be there. And this is not
>     good when Bonobo is getting so fast.

The gnome-help-browser (GHB) will be deprecated starting with GNOME 1.4
and has been replaced by the new help system in Nautilus.  Searching,
indexing, contents list, and other features will be available through
ScrollKeeper.

I'd be interested to hear more about what core functionality you think we
need in the help system.  We still have a long way to go.

> -------------------------------------------------
> 
> That was about the search tool. Now come to Gnome Apps Helps:
> 
> 1) Better indexing format for Apps helps (Current use of Html file
> for the indexing looks too lame). Using XML format for this
> index file would be a good idea.
> 
> 2) Providing the seaching indices (Just like info page nodes).
> 
> 3) If I am going to do these, it will not be very soon. :-)

You should look into ScrollKeeper.  The plan is to extract as much
information as possible from the DocBook/SGML/XML document, and supply
additional metadata either externally (currently) or through additional
DocBook tags (in the future).  Indexing, table of contents, position in
the contents list, search keywords, etc. are provided this way and are
stored as XML.  We have the contents list done and are starting on
searching and indexing for the next release cycle.

The ScrollKeeper web page, which could use a little updating, can be found
at http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/.  There is a link to the mailing
list there.

Dan