RE: Improving the gnome-help-browser HTML?

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean Buckley [mailto:sean.buckley2@btinternet.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 2:15 PM
> To: gnome-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: Improving the gnome-help-browser HTML?
> 
> ----------
> >From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel@helixcode.com>
> >To: gnome-list@gnome.org
> >Subject: Improving the gnome-help-browser HTML?
> >Date: Sat, Apr 1, 2000, 11:00 PM
> 
> >    If you know HTML, we would love to hear from you how we 
> can improve
> > the look of our generated info and man pages.  Please get in touch
> > with us for this.
> >
> 
> I know a fair bit of HTML, and would be willing to get 
> involved. I think the
> most important thing is functionality.. at the moment it's 
> probably quicker
> to bring up an xterm and type 'man' than use the help 
> browser. If there were
> alphabetical links at the top it would save a lot of scrolling.

I don't think HTML skills are what's are needed.  I don't know exactly how
the help browser works, but I assume that the man and info pages are grabbed
by the help browser, and then run through some sort of translation to HTML.
How does this translation work?  Is there a translation engine that's
responsible for everything, or is it modularized, so that you can use CSS,
or XSL to customize the style of the info/man pages?  If it's not
modularized, it will probably be a doozie to "fix" or improve, since you
can't customize it.  If it's modularized, then we just need to figure out
what it should look like (structure, layout, graphics, colors), and write
the appropraite style sheets to do that.  If it's "hard coded", then we
still need to figure it out, but writing the code it probably going to be
more of a pain than just writing a style sheet would be.  How long will the
current help browser be around?  Will we be able to re-use the backend for
the current help browser to translate documents from man/info format to html
for the new help browser when it arrives?  Let me know if I'm off track, or
if you've got any comments.  I've CC'd the GDP in case anybody there isn't
on this list, as they may be the essential party for figuring out how it
should look/feel/work.
	Greg