Re: Thoughts on patch for gcalctool bug #448263

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Jun 18, 2007, at 4:08 AM, Don Scorgie wrote:
> ...
> We're currently working on yelp (really, we are working on it!).  It's
> hoped that soon, there will be a mechanism to launch yelp through dbus
> and improved the handling of starting through the command line.  This
> will have an advantage for modules wanting to drop libgnome.  Yelp will
> handle all parsing of uris.  One thing I've been contemplating is how 
> to handle invalid requests (i.e. asking for a non-installed document). 
>  If yelp handles it, it simplifies translators lives (as the strings 
> won't occur in every module) and would improve consistency (error 
> message is the same every time).  However, would this look 
> out-of-place (i.e. will the popped up unexpectedly placed)?.
> ...

Yes it would ... regardless of where it was placed. People distrust 
computerized help at the best of times. If you want someone to never 
use the help in any Gnome program ever again, putting up an error 
message when they click a Help button is an *excellent* way of doing 
it. ;-)

It's inevitable that occasionally programs will link to help pages that 
don't exist, or that help pages will link to other pages that no longer 
exist. But that's the kind of error that should be displayed only to 
developers, not to other users. Users should be shown relevant search 
results as a fallback instead.

You can achieve this by giving the API for opening a particular help 
document two mandatory arguments (and giving the internal hyperlink 
syntax in Mallard two required attributes): one being the URI of the 
document, the other being relevant search terms for Yelp to fall back 
to if the document doesn't exist.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/