Hi List!
As we now have:
a) an (somewhat) uptodate "Ethereal User's Guide" in html format
b) a way to call a webbrowser (both for GTK1 and 2) to show html pages
in a platform independant way
I would think the time has come to build an online help system depending
on the above components.
As I've implemented the current (plain ASCII text) online help some time
ago, I've soon recodgnized that it won't make a lot of sense to continue
that approach, as ASCII texts are not state of the art to read such
texts (e.g. no way to include screenshots or such), I was thinking about
a way to show html pages as the online help.
To do this, first of all the User's Guide html pages has to be generated
from the source Docbook/XML files currently checked in. Although this
isn't magic, it's not trivial to do so, as the build environment is a
bit complicated to set up. However, we could even check in the html and
dependant files (graphics) somewhere into the Ethereal repository, so
this shouldn't be a real problem.
The next step would be to find a way to install this html and dependant
files on the target system. This had to be different for all the target
platforms Ethereal is working on. I would think, that I could find a way
to do that on win32, but I don't know what effort that would be on other
platforms?!?
As the final step, the "linkage" had to be done from the GUI to the help
pages. As we already have a platform independant way to call (even
local) HTML pages, this shouldn't be magic (but only a kind of labour).
I would think of a "Help" button at the usual dialogs to jump directly
into the online help.
I could prepare an approach for the win32 platform, but will need some
help for all the other platforms. I would start to implement that under
a #ifdef HAVE_ONLINE_HTML_HELP or such, defined in config.h.win32.
What do other's think about that approach?
Regards, ULFL
