On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 05:51:12PM +0100, Rebecca J. Walter wrote: > GNOME has been working on a new help browser that works with XML and > scrollkeeper directly. It is worth checking. Also worth a look is the > project David Merril is working on that will make it possible to use the > XML files and Scrollkeeper stuff with any browser. It is called > Scrollserver I think. I can probably give a little bit more info about these, since I'm helping to complete the gnome help browser and I've done a small bit of hacking on ScrollServer. Firstly, the help browser (yelp) that's intended for GNOME 2 is probably not appropriate as the "lowest denominator". It depends (at least) on the libxml2, libxslt and the gnome-vfs module, which means libbonobo as well (bonobo isn't used in yelp, but it's a requirement for gnome-vfs). So while it will serve any document that is available in scrollkeeper or info or man pages, gimp still needs something simpler for its own use. Yelp will also work with a file passed as a parameter to use for the help file (resolved into an absolute URI by some fairly well-defined rules). Secondly, activity on ScrollServer has slackened a bit lately, since both David Merrill and I have been doing other things. It just presents a front-end to scrollkeeper so that requests can be made of it as if to a webserver and pages are returned in HTML format. All the conversion of XML -> HTML is done on the fly (well, cached) by scrollserver. The dependencies there would be python 2.0 or greater, libxml2 and libxslt. ScrollServer seems like a nice idea to me, but nothing uses it, so I have no idea whether it's actually useful or not. My gut feeling is that serving help pages for a single application from something like ScrollServer is overkill and tricky to manage. Now it's possible that yelp could be slightly adjusted to build and perform at some level of functionality without gnome-vfs. After all, it only uses the gnome-vfs-help library to resolve the uri to look up and to convert it to html (which is really just a call to an external process). The name resolving is much simpler in the gimp and the conversion stuff could either use the same external program or just make direct C calls to libxslt. Right now, this modification isn't going to happen, since we're under the hammer to get something ready asap for GNOME 2. But the design would allow an add-on like this pretty easily, I think. But really, I don't know what the answers are. I just thought I'd through out some opinions and maybe if people want to think this way it will be useful. Cheers, Malcolm -- A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
