Qua, 2007-12-19 às 09:59 +0100, Stephan Kulow escreveu:
For the record: yast-gtk never had help inline and I moved it to a popup for yast-qt too, so perhaps ncurses should follow the crowd and provide help by popup only too.
Hi, I think we still had help as a side pane for 10.2. But I wasn't happy with it, and the final drop was that it got on the way of screen readers. If you guys are following the same path here, it would be cool to re-think the help material. I think most of it is an insult to the user; it describes the interface elements, while failing to explain what the tool is for, and how it will do what it purposes (it should state that it will overwrite file X, Y, and Z, and restart daemon A and B). Some troubleshooting is also in serious need. The lack of overview help material is not only a result of the limited space on the help box, but actual limitations on what its content can be. I would have at least help on the current screen and access to general information on the tool. Eventually, I think help should be completely navigational, possibly using the desktops help programs (KHelpCenter on KDE, Yelp on Gnome). I think it would be nice for Yast to have the syntax to describe the various tools path. The YCP would declare some hooks to build the various yast pages, then use Show(page_id). On top of that, you'd have information on how they relate to each other, and the help material. This would allow more control for the UIs on how they present the interface. For instance, on Gnome, when the user presses "Add Printer", the subsequent dialog should be presented as a new window, with a guideline information on the several steps to complete the task. The current approach where the window morphs into different usage paradigm is pretty awkward. Now, we also need some little text describing the current step. I would make this really small, and let the UI render it as it wants. For instance, as a sub-header. Or for KDE, like KControl modules do, with a little help button that pops up that help with a link to the full thing. We may also want to think on providing tooltips, though I think they are of less priority. Also, it seems that the installer is becoming more RAM expensive at every release. Having a dedicated box to help won't help, because it will encourage people to expand it, and, as it is, the help text stays in memory, including when you go to sub-pages, the parent pages will still be in memory. Cheers, Ricardo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: yast-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: yast-devel+help@opensuse.org