Sorry for the late reply.
On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 21:00:14 -0300 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Inkscape Development Mailing List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: more stuff in Help menu
Since none of our standard libs could offer a cross-platform, easily available way to launch an URL in the user's default browser, I looked around and found exactly what we need in Python (which we carry anyway) - the standard "webbrowser" module. So I created some Python extensions to launch various URLs using webbrowser.open calls, and put them into Help menu:
The help menu already includes many great tutorials and I think that is where the focus should really be and only a few links should be included (particularly given the brittle nature of web links).
- Inkscape Manual links to
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/index.php, do you think we should host a redirect at inkscape.org instead?
Yes definately. In ten years time that link might break, especially since it links to index.php instead of the relevant directory. Odds are it will break far sooner than that - and who knows what it could get changed to - but once there are Inkscape binaries out there in the wild there will be nothing we can do about it.
Inkscape should only include links under the cotrol of Inkscape which can safely be changed later in case of emergency. Who knows in several years Inkscape could be run be a completely different team of bright new developers (hopefully that wont be necessary but again you never know).
So linking indirectly through inkscape.org is best practice and is definately what should be done.
- Command line options: http://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html
Linking to specific .html pages should be avoided, preferably links should go to diretories, that way it doesn't matter if the actual page is index.php or index.cgi or index.html or whatever.
For something like command line arguements it might be better to programatically show exactly what arguements are available in the version the user actually has. Pointing to a page on the web risks giving users information that doesn't match their version, and although there is always that risk it will be particularly obvious and avoidable in this case.
I would be concerend that Command line arguments should not be needed by most users - if many people are using them then batch features of the GUI would need to be improved. The man page or running inkscape --help are the standard places to find command line help, a menu item would be relatively unusual. Simply making sure a copy of the man page was included in the ordinary users manual should nearly be enough.
- FAQ on wiki
Again I'd very strongly prefer to see a nice clean link pointing at inkscape.org/faq/
We've seen the FAQ move several times already and even an update in the Wiki software might cause it to move again.
- Release notes for the current version
Personally I wouldn't consider this as something users would read frequently (more than once even?) and therefore not worth having a menu item.
- "Report a bug" page
Good idea in principle, problematic in practice = bug or feature request? (Mostly a menu item will give you feature requests.)
Real bugs need detailed feedback like stack traces and integration with bug-buddy or similar tools is more likely to result in the kind of high quality feedback you really want.
- SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org
Artists are the target users of Inkscape. Is this really useful to artists?
Also which specification do you link to, there are plenty of variations to choose from and I do think this would be much better served by writing up a page in the documentation.
Referencing the specifications in the manual is certainly a good idea but again I do not think it is something users would check frequently enough for it to deserve a menu item. The manual and the FAQ are two things which I am confident users would check frequently and would even want to have links for both the local (fast access) and online (most up to date) copies.
I tested this and it seems to work well in Linux and Windows. Let me know if you have any problems. Also feel free to suggest other "launch an URL" commands for Inkscape (openclipart? wiki? inkscape.org? Aaron's extension page?)
I would urge restraint since I've seen so many crappy programs with links that no longer point to anywhere useful but it is certainly tempting to include a link to OpenClipart.org at least until OpenClipart.org is integrated with inkscape in some other way.