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

[Mark Shinwell]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 11:44:43AM +0100, Andy Waddington on Survey stuff wrote:
> > 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 !!

What I was referring to is using a GTK component to display HTML pages
neatly inside one of our windows.  The fact that that component happens
to use the Mozilla rendering backend is irrelevant.  I understand
the shared library doing the rendering is fast and not enormous.

You could invoke an external browser but that involves loading it (and
this sounds like a joke, but things like Netscape on Linux take ages to
start and use huge amounts of memory).

> 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 !

I understand Mozilla is being GPLed anyway.  You'd just need another
shared library, just like the multitude of others we will need.

Note I'm not necessarily saying that I think this is the best option but
I don't see anything inherently terrible about it.

> > 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...

Absolutely.

Mark

-- 
Mark Shinwell -- http://mrs30.quns.cam.ac.uk -- Mark.Shinwell@cl.cam.ac.uk
Theory and Semantics Group, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory