Re: [lmi] help and context help

[Greg Chicares]

On 2006-4-12 18:45 UTC, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> 
> [...] So I'd like to return to the basics and decide just what exactly do we
> want. If we can answer the questions below, there would be no need for the
> multitude of the possibilities currently shown and we could make the patch
> much more understandable and closer to the real program. The questions are:

I'd like to ask Rick to reply in detail (and of course anyone else
is welcome to jump in), but let me present some tentative thoughts
without attempting to speak ex cathedra.

> 1. Should we have both [normal] tooltips and context help?
>  
>    For the record, normal tooltips are shown any time the mouse hovers over
>    a control.

To elaborate on that slightly, they appear after a certain delay,
then disappear after a few seconds.

> The context help tooltips appear only when F1 or "?" button
>    in the title bar is pressed.

At least in my experience with msw, context help looks exactly like a
tooltip, except that it appears instantaneously when the user causes
it to be displayed, and doesn't ever automatically disappear--if you
don't touch the mouse or the keyboard, it'll still be shown tomorrow.

Wendy--you're working on this, and none of that work is wasted no
matter how we answer this question. What you're doing is migrating
what was actually context help from our legacy application, e.g.
  HC_SIMPLE_CONTROL(IDC_AGENT_CITY,"Agent city")
to what is (momentarily at least) a tooltip:
  <object class="wxTextCtrl" name="AgentCity">
    ...
    <tooltip>Agent city</tooltip>
and the real work is isolating the text and matching up the identifiers,
like IDC_AGENT_CITY --> name="AgentCity". (Probably it's much harder
than that, because some won't match anything.)

If I understand correctly (don't count on it), this can be switched from
tooltips to context help by changing
-    <tooltip>Agent city</tooltip>
+    <help>Agent city</help>

Perhaps we could even have both by writing both tags, in case we decide
that's what we really want.

> 2. What should pressing F1 when a control is active do?
> 3. Related to the above, what should the "? cursor" do?

A mailing list hosted by gnu.org is an unlikely place to wax nostalgic
about how good the old incarnations of msw used to be, but at least
questions like this used to have a simple answer for that platform:
"Do whatever ms 'word' does". However, it's gotten worse, e.g.:
  http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/errormsg.htm#ERROR7
  http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/tabs.htm#TAB1
  http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/tabs.htm#TAB2
  http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/clarity.htm#CLARITY12
and it sounds like Rick's word-2003 has a radically different concept
of context help than my word-1997.

So I guess the answer to questions like these is "whatever astonishes
the end user least", but what that actually means, I don't know.
Should we start by looking at what wx already does today, and asking
ourselves whether there's a genuine need to change it? I think we can
investigate that now on a variety of msw variants using the patch
already in hand (with a modification Vadim suggested to Rick).