Re: "What's This?" in Describe submenu

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:02:25 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>
> CC: rudalics@gmx.at, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>      Click this to delete all cookies from your machine.
> 
> If the only useful thing that button does is delete all cookies from
> your machine, then your example does not contradict what either Stefan
> or I said.  My claim is that the user expects an overview of what the
> area he clicked on is used for and how he has to use it.  If the only
> meaningful thing he can do is click mouse-1 on it, _then_ it is
> obviously equivalent with describe-key and then clicking mouse-1.
> Otherwise, it is very different.

Theoretically, yes.  But in practice, in my experimentation with this
functionality on Windows, almost all places which are sensitive to the
"What's This?" click are buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, and other
widgets that perform some action, and it's that action that the
popping tooltip describes.

> If after pressing "What's this?" in the KDE icon editor you single
> click mouse-1 on Custom Colors, it tells you what you can do there, in
> particular that you have to _double_ click on a box to edit the color.
> define-key would just tell you that single clicking mouse-1 sets
> point.  If you click on the Draw Grid, it tells you a bunch of stuff,
> including what toolbar items are often useful when you are working in
> this area.

I don't see how this is different from what describe-key does, except
that it sounds like KDE also includes information additional to the
description of the specific click that invoked the help.  There's no
reason, in principle, why we couldn't include such info in the doc
strings, or have some separate collection of such descriptive texts
that would be automatically displayed when related functions' doc
string is shown.

So I still think your objections are generally valid for our doc
strings, not specific to "What's This?".