New help format (regarding Yelp)

[Sridhar R <sridharinfinity yahoo com>]

Yelp (gnome-help) currently uses XML for help formats.
 But the flaw in this is increased disk space. 
Consider a scenarion where help (xml) size is large
for an application.  

But if he uses single XML file for all help content,
the XML tags, when applied every section or every part
will increase the size.  

Furthermore, the help file is NOT compressed

Then, it is only a SINGLE xml document.

I suggest an alternative technique for help format.
Help files consists of

 * an index (or TOC) XML file that points to several
sections which are seperate XML files.
 * Now Compress the whole set of XML files.

The final compressed file consistes of the application
help files .. and this compressed can be _directly_
opened by yelp or gnome-help.

NOTE: It seems like stripping of XML tags is not
desired in favour of advantages of XML.

Note: This is more like CHM, but we use XML
internally.  So the result is more compact help file
(which can be download as single file and executed by
user).

Such a help can not only be applied to GNOME
applications, but also to standard alone documents,
which can be downloaded from internet and viewed.

For eg, gtktutor is downloaded as
gtk.tutorial**.tar.gz

Then the user extracts it, points his/her browser to
/index.html in the extracted directory.

An alternate solution is let the user download our
compressed help file
gtk.tutorial**.chelp (or someother extension)

which may actually be a tar.gz file containing a set
of XML files (set of HTML files here?).

Now he may just click on the .chelp file to bring yelp
help viewer or nautilus can support a new VFS for this
help format, so that the html pages can be displayed
from within nautilus windows using gtkhtml of gecko.

Any thoughts?

=====
"How do you power off this machine?" (Linus, when upgrading linux.cs.helsinki.fi, and after using the machine for several months.) 
---
Sridhar R 
Email: r_sridhar AT users DOT sf DOT net
WWW:   http://sridhar.has.it

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