Re: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1

[Björn Giesler]

Hi,

On Wednesday 22 January 2003 09:31, Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> ibotty wrote:
> > this kind of help is in my understanding a (huge) tooltip.
> > thats how at least kde and windoze understand it too.
>
> KDE and Windows are wrong in lots of ways. :)

Indeed. To put in my €.02, here's how I think the semantics should be, 
increasing in, oh, I don't know, "size" of the help you get:

Tooltip: "What's this UI element do?" Tiny transient!! window pops up and 
describes exactly what the UI element does. Example: "If you click this 
button, the changes you made to this form will be applied."

Context-Sensitive Help: "What can I do in the current context?" Pops up a 
non-transient!! help window[1] that describes what you currently see in the 
window and what you can do. Example: "Enter your network settings into this 
form. The form entries have the following meanings: [...] Netmask: This 
denotes what subnet this computer is in. [...]"

Application Help: "What can I do with this application?" Nuff said.

IMHO, degrading Context-Sensitive Help to some kind of super-Tooltip makes no 
sense at all.

[1] or maybe "semi-transient" in that it vanishes when the context changes. 
Gruß,
                --Björn
-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Björn Giesler, IAIM, University of Karlsruhe (TH)
See http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/users/giesler for information.

A society that will trade a little freedom for a little order will 
lose both, and deserves neither.    --T. Jefferson
Support privacy. Mail me for my PGP/GPG public key.