Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] questions, questions

[Dan M. <d-...@uc...>]

On Thu, 30 Nov 2000, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:

> Bob Stayton wrote:
> > Also, there seems to be a running assumption that an
> > XML-aware browser is available that understands a
> > Contents List and can present it to the user.
> > Is this based on the Gnome and KDE browsers under development?
> > Are other applications expected to use the Contents Lists?
>
> I think Ali answered this mostly. Any browser can use Scrollkeeper as
> long as they understand XML.

Right now we are focussing on the internal workings of ScrollKeeper and
how documents are installed. Note that eventually only scrollkeeper itself
will care how it sorts and stores its data.  We can always change to
another method to store the internal data if we find a better way.

Once we have things working better and the design has stabalized, we can
start putting in a real library to export to help browsers.  For right
now, ScrollKeeper actually points the help browser to its ScrollKeeper's
internal database files which are in XML format.  This is enough to get it
working with GNOME's help browser and any others which are willing to
handle XML files.  We can use this for testing and development. (Remember,
we don't even have a 0.1 version done yet.)  As things mature, we will
eventually hide the internal database from the help browser and provide a
real exported API which potentially will support not only XML-aware help
browsers but perhaps others as well (if there is a demand for it).

As for just supporting GNOME and KDE, this is definitely *not* the
intention.  There are many people who do not use GNOME or KDE, and that
will always be the case.  I would be happy to see another help browser
which is independent of these two desktops and which can utilize
scrollkeeper.  If there was a compelling reason to use some format other
than XML, then scrollkeeper's API could be extended.

Dan