Re: gnome-help: uris

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, David Merrill wrote:

> I'm having a problem with gnome-help: and similar uris. I knew that
> those were being made available in the help browser for the user, but
> I didn't realize that they were being used as uris in ulinks within
> the docbook source. I need to figure out how to handle them.
>
> Can anyone give me some pointers on how they are processed internally,
> or how I might deal with them?

Most, if not all, of the URI resolution is done in gnome-vfs.  I think it
isn't doing anything too complex.  I think gnome-help:foo gets resolved
into something like:
  1) $PREFIX/share/gnome/help/foo/<locale>/foo.xml if it exists.
If not...
  2) $PREFIX/share/gnome/help/foo/<locale>/foo.sgml if it exists.
If not...
  3) $PREFIX/share/gnome/help/foo/<locale>/index.html

Then you have to handle targets: gnome-help:foo#target
If you look in the archives of the gnome-help mailing list, you can find
an email where I enumerated each case and how the target gets expanded.
If I recall correctly, for SGML and XML the target is just the id and I
think it gets expressed as .../foo.xml?target.  For HTML, I believe it
becomes .../target.html.  I don't trust my memory on this right now
though, so you may want to check the archives.

Does it make sense to just use gnome-vfs to resolve these links?  This is
one option, although I'm not sure if you wanted a lot of dependecies for
ScrollServer.

At any rate, this points to a more fundamental problem with how we are
doing things.  We have cooked up our own half-baked way of resolving URI's
which will be a pain for KDE or anybody else to be compatible with.  KDE
is using some other system.  We really need to come up with a URI scheme
which can be shared with other projects to improve compatibility and make
our lives simpler.  I suspect ScrollKeeper may be useful here.  I think we
really need somebody with some spare cycles to focus on this problem a
bit.

Dan