On Apr 25, 2005, at 4:48 AM, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
hi Ben,
B. Bogart wrote: ...
- spec for the searching of help files.
- organization of pd "help" pull-down menu.
- functional catagories for PD externals/objects.
great you are pushing this. Some random thoughts and questions...
Have you considered other ways of browsing -- choosing something that better scales? Not sure if hierarchical pull-down menu is the right way of browsing thousands of items.
There was quite a bit of discussion about this topic at the last pd-dev IRC meeting. The transcripts on puredata.org, it'd also be great to have you along as well. I vaguely remember a loose consensus about some combination of browse and search options as being the best solution.
How would the help files structure relate to eventual structuring of class names into a browsable ``object list'' (btw. such list should have its own "open help file" popup)? And how would these relate to eventual structuring of classes themselves into packages, Guenter's namespaces, or anything that would finally be chosen?
The "object list" help patch basically seems like a version of the "all_about_*" patches that Dave Sabine and I have been writing. I think they are quite useful. Look for them in CVS (doc/pddp) or in the Pd.app I just released.
The structure seems closed. I mean, even though a keyword comment may contain any word that its author finds suitable, only the predefined words would categorize the file for browsing -- is this the case? and if so, why?
A simple set of keywords would be easiest to implement to start with. Then we can test the basic idea out, and see whether its worthwhile to invest a lot of time coding an dynamic, flexible keyword system.
.hc
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