Help System Spec 0.2

[karderio]

Hi :o)

I will try to answer some of your questions.

On Wed, 2006-12-27 at 16:57 +0100, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Saturday 25 November 2006 17:39, Don Scorgie wrote:

> One question, though: Is D-Bus able to start the help browser on demand when a 
> call is made to the API or is it needed that the help browser is already 
> running (providing it is the help browser implementing the API)?

Yes, I believe that Dbus will start Yelp on demand.

> What about adding a call "open_browser", which would open the help browser 
> without showing a specific document, but with a generic start page?

Maybe this could simply be achieved by sending the open_document signal
with the "generic start page" DocIdentifier.

> What's the use case for the close_document call? Wouldn't it be up to the user 
> to close the help window? Maybe it's a lack of my phantasy but I can't 
> imagine a situation where an application wanted to close a help window 
> programmatically.

At first I couldn't see why either, but I think it could perhaps be
useful in some weird and wonderful situations, I've tried to think up a
couple here :

I've seen some apps (on Windows, I think) close the help browser when
you quit an app, not to say that is a good idea ;)

Perhaps if for some reason an app was to open the help browser
automatically (lets imagine to show important information on fist use of
an app) it would want to close it at some point.

> > * Remove the help: URI section.  It causes confusion and is inextensible
> > (installing a package in /opt with the docpath defined as help:<file>
> > would point to the wrong place)
> 
> One purpose of the help: URIs is to specify a standard location for 
> documentation files. While it should be possible to install documentation to 
> other locations it still would be nice to have a standard location, so that 
> the location where files are installed is not completely arbitrary. To make a 
> separate spec for this purpose would probably be overkill, so I think it 
> would be nice to keep this in the help system spec.

I think that even though a section about help: URIs was removed, the
URIs are still permitted in the specification. (See the DocPath key part
of the specification.)

Hope this helps !

Love, Karderio.