R devel - Jan 1998 - New design for R html help pages

Hi,

I've completed a re-design of the R html help pages over the weekend
(without the Kitzb=FChel ski races on TV I would have had some more time
...). The design is actually not from me but from Tanja Afra, a
student of our department.

Anyway, I've put a snapshot on

	http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~leisch/R/doc/html/index.html

please have a look and feel free to make any suggestions when you
think something is not intuitive or ... I really want to get feedback
before I start writing new stuff.

I'm mostly concerned about usability, function is more important than
form. The biggest changes are in the listing of the base package
... there is now a description for each function in it and a
click-able alphabet in the beginning (known bug: it also includes dead
links for letters where no R objects exist.

The function pages contain no `back' button on purpose ... eventually
I also want to include pages from different locations than
$RHOME/library and then there will be no way to have a back button
(these use relative links working only inside $RHOME). Use your
browser's back button or history instead

Features I'll implement once we have agreed on the design:

	*) alphabetic list of all functions installed in RHOME
	*) function lists sorted by keywords
	*) help() optionally sends a request to netscape instead of
	   displaying the nroff version (controlled via options or
	   something similar)

Features I'd like to have but don't know how to do (because I don't
speak Java):
	*) search the help pages


Ok, so much for contents, now for design: The look of a product is
certainly important when trying to sell something, so I really think
we should have something slick (would be depressing if people don't
use R simply because the Splus manual looks better ...)

I don't want to enforce the logo ... it's just that pages look better
with something on it and I think Tanja did a nice job ... if soembody
send's a better one, I've just to replace one jpg file.


Ok, so much for now.

Best,
Fritz

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                        Friedrich  Leisch                            =20
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Fritz

One potential problem with the html help is the difficulty of dealing with file
systems which do not support long file names (since you're using function
names
as file names). I guess we can ignore DOS. I'm not sure if Windows poses any
problems, but for some reason I thought there were some Unixes that also caused
problems?

Paul

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There will definitely be problems on Windows if we go to a system with
long file names. We really must maintain (at a least a version of the
html help) with file names that comply with the old Windows standard
of 8.3. There are a large number of machines (most in students hands)
that run older versions of windows.

robert
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