Hey all, I am considering writing a simple/stupid XML parser. Nothing fancy, but it will be enough for my needs.
Now I must say that I have always hated /help, almost as much as hop hates
it. The number one thing I have against it is that /help expects you to
have an 80 column display. Well, I have that, but I also have an output
rewrite rule which adds a timestamp to everything, cutting me down to
about 72 effective columns, which breaks /help unless I complicate the
rule or use the older hackish ways of doing timestamps in scripts or
something like that.
Well, I'm going to write this XML thingy anyway because I want to be able
to use it in Project Twilight for parsing the documentation that will be
written eventually for the internal help command. If you people are
willing, I am willing to try and hack this into the help system with the
possible help of others who haven't been approached yet. I'm hoping that
even though hop has sworn off /help, he'd agree this is a worthwhile
enough improvement to work with me on it. ;)
My goal is to have all help files in epic converted to a very simple XML
DTD which epic itself would know how to read intrinsicly. This DTD won't
be much, but it will let epic preparse the help files and print out the
help contents at the appropriate size for the window as it sits right now.
Note, it won't work if you resize and there are perfectly valid reasons
for that based on how epic currently saves its text buffer. I am also
willing to help write XSLT filters for turning the help into a real HTML
manual, though I definitely do not currently understand this enough to do
it on my own.
C'mon guys, /help sucks ass and we all know it. Whaddaya say?
--
Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sanity is counterproductive
I did it just to piss you off. :-P
-- Branden Robinson in a message to debian-devel
msg00175/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
