Concerning help: Currently there is no explicit "help" concept in webYaST. One reason is that usability studies
Which usability studies? [citation needed]
showed that users often find "Help" quite unhelpful
But that's not the fault of the users! Why should the users be punished for the fact that hackers are unable to write proper help by being given no help at all?
and the other reason is that it is our aim to create an UI which is so simple and self-explanatory that "Help" becomes superflous.
There is nothing wrong with the effort to create UI that is simple and self- explanatory. But - there are concepts you can't do away with and yet you can't make them self-explanatory no matter how hard you try. Taking the recent 'wontfix-ed' example - what if I don't know what a DNS server is? Do I have to open a separate tab in browser and google for it? Shouldn't the application/website I'm using provide me with all the information I need instead?
If you want to give the user detailled information about a setting use either prefilled input fields or a short explanatory text below the settings label.
"detailed information" and "short explanatory text" contradict each other. You either have detailed info and your text is no longer short, or the text is short and the info is not detailed anymore. LiveJournal (a popular blogging site) uses '?' icons adjacent to the form fields which are not self-explanatory. Our very own SLMS web frontend does the same (LJ icons link to FAQ which then open in separate window, SLMS shows the explanation in icon tooltip). Not only those two concepts show the help when the user wants to be helped, but it looks somehow pretty as well. But obviously, my concept of "pretty", "cool" and "helpful" is entirely different from those of the rest of the (normal) world sB. -- \\\\\ Katarina Machalkova \\\\\\\__o YaST developer __\\\\\\\'/_ & hedgehog painter