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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    GSoC Idea: KHelpCenter Rewrite
From:       Harald Sitter <sitter () kde ! org>
Date:       2011-04-04 12:16:07
Message-ID: 201104041416.11868.sitter () kde ! org
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Aloha!

Here is something I have been thinking about for quite some time...

Since this has become a candidate for TLDR here is the short version:
KHC is no goody, I want to make it more goody, what we need is better looks 
and integration of web content. I would like to propose that as GSoC project.

Long version:
- Intro
Maybe it is just me, but KHelpCenter does not really live up to its potential. 
It does not look all that visually compelling, I did not see the search 
feature working *properly* in years (though that might also be because someone 
at Kubuntu decided it would be a good idea to patch away the search tab ;)) 
and it does not bring all available information to the user.

- About the Internet
Let me in particular reason a bit on that last point as I find the current 
state of affairs rather interesting.
At least to me it would appear that using online documentation rather than 
docbook documentation (or a combination of both) is become a lot more 
attractive these days. They certainly both have advantages and disadvantages, 
but what we should acknowledge is that the existence of services such as 
userbase.kde.org, or stackexchange.com if you will, adds a whole new dimension 
to how documentation (read: knowledge) gets shared.
Whatever you may think of the whole online vs. offline documentation topic, 
there is a very valid gain for the user in bringing the two closer together. 

Someone who has internet access and knows how to use a search site will more 
likely try to look for information online rather than offline. This is however 
not mutually exclusive with having offline documentation nor with having an 
application dedicated to present relevant information to the user.
Actually I would argue that there should be a symbiosis of them.

- Mixin
Offline documentation provides a solid base of information on a vast amount of 
topics/applications. But imagine how cool it would be if we could enrich this 
solid base with additional unicorn sparkles and rainbows from the mighty and 
all-knowing internet.
For example: you are reading up on Amarok in KHC because for some reason the 
audio quality is not quite what it should be. You are skimming through the 
handbook but there is nothing regarding your problem. Oh! But what is this? A 
tiny box next to the handbook that goes "Common Problems with Amarok: Sound is 
crap[link] My N900 is not detected[link]". Cool. So you click the first link 
and get all the information you need to fix the problem. (Turns out someone was 
using Phonon's Xine backend :P).
Interestingly enough you also find out that there is a brand new awesome 
version of Amarok available, you get directions on how to upgrade and live 
happily ever after.

- Let's crowdsource it!
We all know that content on the internet is not always all that helpful and 
not always all that well written, so we could/should do something about that 
to. How about letting people rate content, add the information on what they 
were searching for into the mix and here comes semantic help :)

- And Video!
Now, I have only been talking about textual information, but let us not forget 
about other types of media. In particular screencasts.
I happen to know some people who actually tend to go to youtube to find out how 
to do something rather than google for it. And indeed videos are a very 
convenient way to share knowledge. It is a bit of shame that this is not more 
tightly integrated into the help center, is it not?

- Summary
So, let me sum this up.
* I do not think KHC is all that awesome right now.
* Dragging information in from the internet is a great opportunity
* Supporting multi media content would be terrific
* Adding semantics to information would also be jolly awesome.

- Technical Thoughts
Finally to get a bit of a technical blah in here. On the information 
"aggregation" side KHC should be very scalable. Getting information from 
userbase.kde.org and other KDE specific resources is good. But we should also 
keep in mind that most distributions have documentation of their own (online 
that is), or screencast services (I know Ubuntu got one). Those should also 
nicely integrate.

A plugin based approach would seem very useful here. Have a couple of resource 
providers that
a) get information
b) search information
(c) display information, I am not quite sure about this. Should there actually 
be formats that can not be broken down to a HTML representation it probably 
would make sense to allow, but not enforce, that a plugin can implement their 
own view for displaying the information... something to think about)

Offline documentation search should not use htdig but maybe something like 
clucene for deployment reasons mostly. Mixing in online search results as 
provided by the resource provider plugins.

What would be interesting is redoing the UI using QML (because it is so much 
bling :)), I am not quite sure if that would make all that much sense at this 
point though.


What do you think about this? Would this be a good project for GSoC?
I would love to get some feedback :)


regards,
Harald

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