[Sugar-devel] Html browse widget for runtime help

[Gary Martin]

Hi George,

On 23 Jan 2011, at 15:12, George Hunt <georgejhunt at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I don't follow the list often, but I feel strongly about this topic.  I think that HELP should be included in all new activities. And it's easiest for me to develop help, and to borrow from open source docs if they are in html format.

I just wanted to chime in here to give a different slant. Any time I see something that requires a help document, I immediately consider is as a band-aid for some level of failure in the UI design. Now no design is ever perfect, and there are cases where text becomes necessary, but the more documentation needed, the more the UI is likely failing. There are of course exceptions, especially where lesson guides/plans may be of help, but I'd be seriously worried if help was needed to be included in many Activities, it adds a heavy burden to developers, maintainers, and translators — the community can hardly keep the wiki texts up to date.

So, why would I want to see an HTML widget in Sugar? It would allow the easy creation of Activities wrapping around existing HTML content (replacing the need for library content bundles), right now it's too much effort as Browse based code breaks too frequently between Sugar releases.

Regards,
--Gary

> Towards this end, I hacked an early browse, and included a bare bones hulahop client with PyDebug and XoPhoto, currently my only two Activity efforts.  I believe in backwards compatibility, and early webview widget does a hide parent window, and doesn't play well in a larger activity. I discovered a work around, which involves putting the webview widget in its own window, and switching windows as required. I include an early HELP template in the examples included with PyDebug.
> 
> The down side of this approach is that the developer needs to mimic the activity menu, for the screen that includes the webview widget.  But it's mostly cut and paste. and pretty quick.
> 
> More recently, I've been stitching Gvim Tutor and IPython together in a Terminal Activity framework.  I have added a html help function that runs on builds 703 through 860.  If I were to strip out the Vim and IPython, easy and quick to do, what's left would be a pretty good framework for lots of ITcore learning activities I have in mind, and might be more generally useful.
> 
> George
>  
> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:13:34 +0000
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [PATCH Sugar] Extend sugar-launch with more options
> On 20 Jan 2011, at 10:24, Sascha Silbe wrote:
> 
> Well, it is a common UI in other operating systems, so I would not specifically call this out as poor from a UI stand point. There have been many long threads about this in the past, with folks wanting to launch activities from each other (common case cited is having lesson plan documents of some kind, that can launch the related activities as you work through them). However, in the discussions I remember, all of them hit the issue of breaching Rainbow and its desired security model. I would also be keen to see Rainbow back in Sugar.
> 
> > My suggestion was to offer a very simple HTML widget in sugar-toolkit
> > that could be used by the activity to display the document inside the
> > running activity.
> 
> Whatever the outcome of this thread, I'd love to see a sugar-toolkit HTML widget that activities could easily embed. The issue for activity authors for a longtime is that it may be easy to fork Browse and add in your own html content, but it is very solution brittle and your activity will almost certainly break on each new Sugar release.
> 
> > This is another iteration of the "online" (i.e. runtime) activity
> > documentation topic.
> >
> > Gary, what's your take on this?
> 
> Yes, though I think Martin may be after this as part of his Notification work? I've seen one screen shot where some part of the notification text message was a URL link, kind'a worried me at the time (given the above reasons).
> 
> 
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