Re: Standardizing help paths

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnu org>]

On the magic "ghelp" url:

> I've started doing a little bit of work on the Gnome help subsystem. I'd
> like to come up with a standard way of referring to a help
> page/entry/whatever. ghelp: is a really bad hack (it's not a protocol,
> daggone it!).

The "ghelp:" prefix (or the http, ftp) are not intended to be
"protocol" selectors, but the beginning of a universal resource
identifier.

I hope Jim can help us coming up with a nice scheme, it seems your
proposed scheme is just reinventing things that have already been
invented.

> I've started doing a little bit of work on the Gnome help subsystem. I'd
> like to come up with a standard way of referring to a help
> page/entry/whatever. ghelp: is a really bad hack (it's not a protocol,
> daggone it!).
> 
> For the first draft, I produce:
> 	  [appname,foo/bar/baz/blum]
> 
> Which might turn into
> /gnome/share/gnome/help/appname/C/foo.html#bar_baz_blum, except that
> turning this into an actual /path/file.html#section is sort of a mystery,
> since there is no way to find the HTML file that corresponds to a specific
> piece of the SGML source.
> 
> Since you are the documentation people, I suspect you have some better
> ideas,

Miguel.