On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 13:12, Claus Färber wrote: > Peter S Galbraith schrieb/wrote: > > Claus Färber <claus@xn--frber-gra.muc.de> wrote: > >> It can be a seperate XML (or whatever) file that's only read by the > >> software. > > > But that's not what he meant! Please don't change what he said to fit > > your view. > > That's your interpretation of what he said. Please don't interpret what > he said to fit your view. That's not an interpretation; that's rewriting what he said. His point is that many programs do embed documentation in the source - often purposefully, like CWeb. Saying "it can be a separate XML file" doesn't change the fact that you could *also* use the actual source, which many people do. > > That would be a major inconvenience to do in elisp instead of > > simply insert the text in the code. > > Which is a bad programming practice as it makes translations harder. gettext can work with strings directly in the source, or so I believe. Also it doesn't solve the issue of source code comments. > Further, texts so smalled can hardly be based on full-text documentation > but have to be re-written anyway. If the manual is well-written, you should be able to use the same sentence for the tooltip, and for the command reference. > They are probably trivial enough not > to be copyrightable anyway. Bullshit. Any modern UI probably has > 100 menu elements, and with a tooltip, that's 100 "sentences", or probably 300-700 words. Easily a derivative work of the manual. Doing a rough count of my Evolution mail composing window, there's roughly 120 UI elements that could use a tooltip - some are repeated in the toolbar and menus, and so it's probably closer to 80-100. However, that's *solely* for the mail composing window. I'd say 500 sentences - about 2000 words - would be a minimum for Evolution. Emacs? I don't even want to think about it. -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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