Re: [semi-OT] Apple's Help Viewer: a note to the frustrated
Re: [semi-OT] Apple's Help Viewer: a note to the frustrated
- Subject: Re: [semi-OT] Apple's Help Viewer: a note to the frustrated
- From: Gwynne <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 09:42:33 -0400
On May 8, 2004, at 7:36 AM, Gregory Weston wrote:
As of Panther ... Help Viewer seems to use exactly the
same engine for rendering as Safari 1.2, which means that it supports
full HTML 4, XHTML 1.0/1.1, CSS1/2, JavaScript, and all the other
goodies. It is my opinion that anyone who requires Panther should take
advantage of this capability in Help Viewer....
"Should" is an interesting word. You're essentially recommending that
we use an undocumented API. It may be convenient, and it may very well
be that the lack of documentation is either an oversight or a lack of
resources in Cupertino but the fact remains that until and unless it's
documented it's not supported. Ain't nuthin' sayin' that what you
observed in Panther is true on my machine or will remain true in
Tiger. While I suspect this is probably safe, it's not unheard of for
Apple to deploy something for their own use and then kill it because
it turned out to have unforeseen issues. People who discovered and
took advantage of those facilities screwed their customers.
I understand your argument, and it's a good one. However, HTML
rendering engines bend over backwards, sideways, and in some
calisthetically impossible directions to be forgiving of various forms
of HTML; even if Apple reverted Help Viewer to HTML 1.0 tomorrow, the
Help written in XHTML 1.1 with CSS2 would still display, albiet as
little more than plain text with embedded images. While it is of course
impossible to predict "unforseen issues", there is no reason whatsoever
to believe that having Help Viewer support more rather than less forms
of HTML could have negative consequences.
And, most importantly, the capability is already there. Documented or
not, I will not have been the only person to discover it, and I can't
believe I'd be the only person to take advantage of the power. Apple's
opened the door by providing it in Panther, and they'll cause breakage
by undoing that. Granted, they've shown astonishingly little respect
for causing breakage lately, but if they're willing to do this they'd
better give me a _very_ good reason I have to rewrite my entire help
book to be three times as big on-disk and not look half as good. (I'm
not just blowing smoke with these numbers; using a central stylesheet
and div/span rather than adding six attributes to every cell in a
table-based layout saves so much space that it makes me wonder how we
ever survived the older way.)
-- Gwynne, key to the Code that runs us all
Formerly known as Sailor Quasar.
Email: email@hidden
Web:
http://musicimage.plasticchicken.com/
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