Re: [lmi] "Help" button really does do something

[Greg Chicares]

On 2018-03-07 12:41, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2018 02:29:03 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

[...the "Help" pushbutton in the tabbed dialog, under "OK" and "Cancel"...]

> GC> Perhaps we should nevertheless remove it, though for a different
> GC> reason--namely, that what it does is not useful in context. The html
> GC> user mainly describes menuitems (and their corresponding toolbaritems),
> GC> which are not accessible while the tabbed dialog is displayed.
> 
>  Ideal would be to make it to something helpful, but if it can't be done,
> then removing it might indeed be better than showing the top level help
> page which is not really useful in this context.

We have a certain amount of help content, and various past, current,
or possible future mechanisms for delivering it.

The content consists of two parts:
(1) this number:
  $wc --lines [a-z]*.html 
  1832 total
of lines in webpages (of which many are blank or comments); and
(2) this number:
  $grep help *.xrc | wc --lines 
  832
of lines of help text in XRC files. Beyond that,
(3) we do not contemplate adding any third category of content.

The "Help" pushbuttons in XRC files today provide (1), which is
so un-useful in their context that we should either delete them,
or make them do the reasonable thing, which is to provide (2).

I think the decision tree is:

Is (2) accessible to native msw end users through any mechanism?
Right-click a control and pick a "Help" option on a pop-up menu?
Click a "?" titlebar button (not the pushbutton), then click a
control? Hover the mouse over a control? If any of these things
works (or there's another attractive mechanism that can easily
be added for control-specific help), then (2) is accessible
already (or can easily be made so...and the "Help" pusbuttons
should be removed because they're at best an unnatural way of
accessing (2).

Otherwise, is there any feasible way of using those pushbuttons
to provide (2)? If so, we should consider it. If not, we should
remove them.

Should we nevertheless retain the "Help" pushbuttons just in
case we write a whole new category of help text (3)? When?
In the year 2525--if we are still alive--if users can survive?
No. Not gonna happen.