Re: gnome-help: uris

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 12:55:42AM -0400, David Merrill wrote:
> Back to the uri issue, because it's my only problem left with
> rendering all ScrollServer documentation properly, including internal
> links.
> 
> The problem is that if you're not in the Gnome Help Browser, uris like
> gnome-help: just don't work. They never get fed down to the http
> server. So the Gnome-specific uri won't work. It has to start with
> http:// and go from there.
> 
> I could work around this by just hacking the xsl stylesheets so that
> gnome-help gets converted to http://gnome-help/ but do you think
> that's a good solution? It's awfully kludgy. The clean solution is a
> standard uri scheme for us all to use. We all have to be able to parse
> the documentation that's installed in ScrollKeeper.

I think doing the rewrite as it passes through ScrollServer is the right
thing to do.

My view is that all the documents are in XML and need to be parsed by
the help system before vieing. Something like ScrollServer provides a
means for converting the DocBook XML into "pure" HTML for viewing in any
web browser. Since web browsers only handle a few different schemes in
URIs and you can count on them knowing about "http://";, you are using
that.

Other help browsers and document viewers which are more tightly tied to
GNOME will also be able able to parse the DocBook XML and _will_
understand the "ghelp://" or "gnome-help://" or whatever-it-is-this-
month scheme.

My understanding is that ScrollKeeper stores meta-information about
documents in a non-application-specific fashion. The problem you are
running into is that web browsers need to be set up especially to
understand a certain type of valid URI. You can handle that (nicely, in
my view) with the dynamic rewrite above and leave the ghelp:// reference
there for those applications which can handle it differently.

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

I never responded to this bit at the time, but since it's still kicking
around: I disagree. We are using valid URIs and the proposed scheme (as
outlined in jrb's "undelivered mail" thread) made sense. What we have to
do is document it clearly so that if any other application wants to be
able to parse ghelp://... style URIs they can look at a document and
know unambiguously how to do it.

Malcolm

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