Spud help (was re: Spud Stuff ...)

[Andy Waddington on Survey stuff]

> Coding in a specific browser, especially a fat one, is a very
> stupid idea

It's amazing how much of the world is at least this stupid !!

Doesn't pretty much every platform have a fairly sensible way of doing this
sort of thing without your software knowing what browser(s) is/are
installed?

In RISC OS you just Filer_Run a file with the html (&FAF) filetype, and it
is passed round the tasks - if one (a browser, of course) wants it, then it
responds and then loads the page. If no-one responds, then the OS does an
Alias$@RunType_FAF which runs a browser, assuming the filer has seen one.

Linux desktops use MIME types to achieve the same thing (and most
distributions include about a dozen browsers some of which are impossible
not to instal), and even Windows seems to be able to fire up a browser
within a couple of minutes of double-clicking on an html file on five out of
ten occasions (more if you have never installed Netscape), so presumably has
a way of doing it, which, if you pay for enough Windows certification, MS
might tell you about (although they might have to kill you after they've
told you...)

> tables is the most advanced thing we might need
> There is no issue of browser compatibility at all here

I can see that Survex will soon say "Use of !Arcweb deprecated" then :-)
But you are quite right, even the tiny text-only browsers like Links, Debris
and W3M do tables, though Lynx struggles....

> Mozilla might be a bit too big

as well as not being available on all platforms, and being a pig to
install on others. We really must avoid any dependence on a specific
product, especially ones which are not fully GPL !

> The real benefit of using docbook is you can generate a nice printed
> version

This *is* an advantage - many users would still like a nice ringbinder
full of reference info, so including the means to generate a printable
manual is definitely a good plan. But it does mean that you want to
write your documentation in such a way that you don't need significant
changes with every release - a printed manual that tells you to do
things that no longer work is a real irritation...

Andy