[Squeakfoundation]About a Squeak Assistant

[Giovanni Giorgi]

As promised ;) I have written down some ideas about a visual support
for an integrated Squeak Tutorials.
A simple idea is this.

We can write tutorial using html and some "magic" urls, using the
Scamper borwser for viewing the tutorial.

The advantage is simple: you can re-use existing documentation and
adding documentation in html is simpler than using xml docbook or sgml.

I have tried to define a new special "Url" called a SqueakTutorialUrl.
It looks like:

squeak://openForMe/Celeste

This url sends to Celeste the open method. This 
emulates the "open for me xxxx" link used under
Apple and Windows online help.

squeak://tutorialAction/TutorialName/action
Do something of special using a TutorialName instance
(for example: executing 'TutorialName newTutorial  action').

Some extension:
squeak://?SomethingThatCanGenerateDynamicContents

squeak://loadTutorial/Tutorial.zip
Unzip and load the Tutorial.zip. Tutorial.zip contains
some html pages (Tutorial-1.html, etc) and a Tutorial.st code file.
This url load Tutorial.st and then return Tutorial-1.html as contents.
Tutorial.st defines the class TutorialName
Then url like squeak://tutorialAction/TutorialName/action
will work.

Benefits:
+ It is simple (I had only to extend the absoluteFromText: method in the
Url class).
+ It is simple to extend/embed: you can build a new tutorial, bringing
with you a special TutorialClassCode.st file).
+It is quiet efficient.
+It can give us compatibility with current old style html tutorial.
+You can embed the tutorial in a project or in the image with  small
efforts.

But:
+It is not secure (malicious code can be inserted).
+Only Scamper/Squeak can handle these special urls.
+Feature must me minimal and well thinked.

What do you think?
Ciao ciao
Giovanni Giorgi