Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] questions, questions

[Laszlo K. <las...@su...>]

> On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 09:59:55PM -0200, Ali Abdin wrote:
> > XML is just the file format that ScrollKeeper uses to store its own "data".
> > Wether GNOME and KDE have an XML browser is irrelevant. The fact is,
> > ScrollKeeper could have used its own non-standard file format, or it could
> > have used the easily parsable XML file format (there are tons of XML parses on
> > almost all platforms, and it beats creatign your own parser for the format).
> > ScrollKeeper uses libxml to do its own parsing, so that does limit your
> > choices (but libxml is cross-platform, doesn't depend on any other libraries
> > (although it is part of the GNOME platform), and it is written in C (meaning
> > you can create wrapper APIs in other languages)).
> >
> > GNOME has a file-manager called Nautilus (in development), in this file
> > manager there is a 'Help Sidebar'. This sidebar presents the documents
> > installed on the system to the user. Sun submitted a patch to make it utilize
> > the scrollkeeper XML file.
> >
> > When you select an item in this Help Sidebar, /then/ the Help Browser starts
> > up and displays the document (based on the document URI).
> 
> You just contradicted yourself and confused me. If the XML is a purely
> internal data structure, why is Nautilus reading it?

The way how it works is that XML files are exported from Scrollkeeper to
the browser. The main Content List (where every entry is a different
doc), the TOCs of each doc and the combination of the two (called the
Extended Content List) are all XML files. Apart from that everything Ali
wrote is valid (about the availability of the XML parsers on various
platforms, Gnome, Nautilus etc).

Laszlo