> > An other idea could be to add a description to every property. So the > > user can figure out what each of those are good for when browsing the > > tree. And when we would change our command line options to be property > > entries we cuold automatically create the --help option which will > > allways stay up to date. > > I think that's a great idea. There are two reasonable choices: > > 1. Allow a "description" attribute for each property in the XML > markup. It could contain only plain text in a single language, but > would be trivially easy to access. > > 2. Allow a "url" attribute for each property in the XML, pointing to a > Web page (or part of a Web page) describing the property. The HTTP > server could handle L10N through content negotiation, and we could > make the documentation as elaborate as we want; however, it would > be hard to stick the docs into the property picker. > > I'm going to recommend #1, even though it supports only English > documentation. We can always add something more elaborate later, but > a navel-gazing, chauvenistic, English-only system that everyone uses > is better than an idealized, multilingual system that no one does. If > anyone complains, I'll consider doing the whole thing in 7th-century > Insular Latin instead.
I'm going to complain, mainly because I'm intrigued as to what the 7th-century Insular Latin version would be like: Rather than a description attribute, if you have description as a child element, then the description can have its own language attribute. The default value for the language attribute can be chauvenistic English, and the multilingual stuff can optionally be done by using additional description elements with a specific language attribute, e.g. <description language="xx">. As for all the other information which could be added to the property tree, but which is not required at run time, then that could be stripped out of a runtime copy of the tree if performance was an issue. Mally _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
