Re: New help format (regarding Yelp)

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 22:40, Sridhar R wrote:
> 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.

This will be larger than just compressing the original single file.

My main problem with your reasoning is that you have not really argued
convincingly that the small amount of space saved by compressing the
files is worth the extra time we need to spend on uncompressing them
when reading them. Popping up the help page after somebody hits "help"
is something we want to do as fast as possible. If that means we blow an
extra 10MB or so of disk space on the files (compressing all my help
files did not save that much when I tried it just now), then that is
hardly too large a price to pay.

Malcolm