414213 - Allow Help Viewer's toc to link to external documents

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Help Viewer, enhancement)

Description

[Steffen Wilberg]

I don't know if SUMO wants to use Toolkit's Help Viewer for displaying the previous in-product help documents.
But I have a patch which allows to do that by linking to external documents from the table of contents: Instead of prefs.xhtml you can link to http://support.mozilla.com/kb/prefs-en-US.

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

CCing mconnor and beltzner, too.

Not sure, would a screen shot help with that decision?

Comment 2

[Steffen Wilberg]

Attachment: don't filter out http

Currently, Help Viewer prepends helpBaseURI to the links in the table of contents, which is defined in firebirdhelp.rdf as "chrome://browser/locale/help/" (by the way, you can even browse that like a ftp listing).

To provide for some internal and some external links, help viewer has to stop prepending helpBaseURI to http: links.

Comment 3

[Steffen Wilberg]

Attachment: proof-of-concept: use sumo's prefs-en-US

This makes Help Viewer use SUMO's version of the preferences document by replacing "prefs.xhtml" by "http://support.mozilla.com/kb/prefs-en-US" in firebird-toc.rdf.
Works just fine, including Help buttons in the preferences dialog.

The page reloads every time you switch to another document and back, but that's due to sumo's "Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache" http header.

SUMO's page layout is pretty wide though.

Comment 4

[Steffen Wilberg]

Attachment: screenshot

This shows the Help Viewer. I've made it wide enough to show SUMO's sidebar on the right.

Comment 5

[Steffen Wilberg]

Attachment: screenshot: smaller window

Of course it doesn't have to be that large just to read the text.
And you can collapse the sidebar of the Help Viewer by dragging it to the left.

Comment 6

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Comment on attachment 299557 [details] [diff] [review]
don't filter out http

Beltzner says we're probably going to just use a new window/tab. Either way, we need to be much more careful here, I don't know if the help viewer has all the security checks thr browser window has, etc.