Re: gnome-help: uris

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 12:14:31AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> 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.

I definitely do not want to rely on gnome-vfs. I don't even have gnome
installed on my production servers. No X at all, in fact. That's one
of the reasons I'm doing ScrollServer in the first place..

> 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.

Yep. And you're right, it definitely should be using ScrollKeeper. I'm
happy to donate some cycles, but I'm not sure I can be of that much
help.

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

Free Dmitry Sklyarov!  http://www.freesklyarov.org
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