Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Hypertext help

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Artur Biesiadowski (abies@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> What do you think about making help system a bit better ? I'm thinking

> Format that comes to mind is some subset of HTML. It is possible to
> support old fixed length lines and HTML <BR> tags - html ignores
> newlines, old client ignores <BR> tags (or even all tags).

I was thinking about this briefly the other week, and it seems feasible
to use an XML parser of some sort.  (Note: HTML is, I think, an extended
subset of XML, which is just slightly less powerful than SGML.)

Of course, we'd need a GPL'd XML parser -- the leaner the better.  Then
we'd need to hook it into the client so that the parsed XML produces
help messages in the appropriate contexts.

It gets more complex when you consider that a lot of the help text
depends on game features that are defined in the rulesets.  Since there's
a movement afoot to generalize the game to make modifications easier,
the help "text" would have to be incorporated into the rulesets somehow.
(Having a single "helpdata.xml" file (or whatever) per ruleset directory
seems to be the most straightforward.)

If someone can get a working XML text system in place, I'd be willing
to do the grunt work of converting the help text to XML.  I've done a
bit of SGML work before (but nothing large).

How would this work with the i18n efforts?  I don't really understand
gettext() yet, so I don't know how it applies to semi-natural-language
data files.

-- 
Greg Wooledge                    | Distributed.NET http://www.distributed.net/
wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx             | because a CPU is a terrible thing to waste.
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |