removal of KWhatsThisManager?

[Stefan Majewsky]

Am Samstag, 15. Mai 2010, 00:46:34 schrieb David Jarvie:
> I find whats-this a very useful thing sometimes, as a user. It can
> provide, when appropriate, a much longer text than would be reasonable for
> a tooltip. Sometimes when you can't understand exactly what a control is
> for, the choice is opening the manual, searching through it to try to find
> the right section to see if what you want to know is stated there - a long
> process - or, just view a whats-this, which, if it's implemented, can give
> a quickly accessed bit of context help.

I just tried it in KMail: There is only one meaningful whats-this message 
(meaningful as in: existing and not equivalent to the tooltip message), which 
is of no value because nobody will ever try to use it.

So if we keep whats-this (I find this discussion very worthwhile BTW), we need 
to do one of the following:
1. make it more visible which widgets have whats-this information
2. better integrate whats-this messages with the documentation workflow

I'm afraid that 1 will produce too much visual noise for the non-newbie user 
even if it is done right, so I'm all for 2. It could look something like this:
1. The tooltip includes a "more information" link.
2. When the "more information" link is clicked, the tooltip expands and shows 
the whats-this text. The "more information" link stays, however.
3. When the "more information" link is clicked again, the appropriate manual 
section is opened.

Of course there are some problems with this approach (like the issue that 
tooltips may not be click-through anymore, and that manual references need to 
be defined manually most of the time), but I'm confident someone can come up 
with a good design.

Greetings
Stefan