Most of the content of each page is in the range of hundreds of bytes, and the images are under 1MB in size. So on older machines I would rather worry about disk access time instead of taking up 2-3 MB more RAM.
Why make something complicated that doesn’t need to be just to make it a few ms faster?
If javascript is added it should be for things like filtering topics etc… and should fall back to still being functional without it.
What if this morphs into a help knowlege base… is slightly slower but mostly constant loading time from disk not better than a JS application that doesn’t scale up to that?
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A quick tour is not supposed to become a knowledge base, so there is no scaling issue. And pre-loading is especially beneficial for older hardware, so there’s no need to oppose a technology that is so well established and supported.
Except when it’s not. NetSurf doesn’t support it at all and WebKit does not support old hardware (SSE being minimum for our port, and SSE2 in upstream I think). If it won’t run at all, what benefit is there in faster loading?
The haiku tour only need to run perfect with the standard browser of haiku: NetPositive.
No one have installed a other browser at first start now.
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I don’t think JS is necessary, if we can get away without it. All images together are currently below 1 MiB! There’s nothing to gain here speed-wise.
JS may have some advantages wrt navigation and not having to manually change stuff when a slide is added/removed/moved. But since most of that work is already done, and I don’t expect major changes, it’s probably not worth it either. At least not right now, when we try to get it to ship in time with the beta.
I do, however, like @apgreimann’s dots in the nav bar that shows where you are in the tour and lets you jump to a specific slide (here a tooltip with the slide topic would be useful, though).
I’m not much of a HTML or JS coder, so contributions here would be welcome. (Best without introducing JS though).
The Team monitor seems like the more user-friendly solution than that finger-twisting Spockism. Also, with TM you can kill servers etc. that are not in the Deskbar. I will think of how best to point to the VDG though…
Your other suggestions are sound, too.
Yes, a link to the Welcome/Userguide on the start page is a good idea. The tour will start with the start page, of course. The contents page is just in case the user arrived at the end of the tour and would like to jump to a specific topic again.
Come to think of it, @apgreimann called it “Topics” which I actually like better than contents.
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Would be fine if the welcome page and tour now the bookmark icons have.
What it’s easy to understand why you guys want have this functional in any browser, regardless of their JS support or personal preference (some people disable JS), let’s take a look at some facts:
- SSE came with Pentium III;
- SSE2 came with Pentium 4;
- Pentium II CPUs were typically available for motherboards having support for 256MB RAM or less, which is no longer enough for Haiku (I checked), so older PCs are also out of the question;
Considering all these and the fact that NetSurf only supports HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1, I see no reason for NetSurf to be recommended for anything officially supported. Anyway, I will no longer insist on JS.
NetSurf is a need for fast and lightweight browsers for simple browsing. I use it for various news and even Youtube browsing which I can playback videos without a lot of browser overhead.
Some web servers can detect legacy browsers (i.e. the one-off ones) and use a mobile or legacy web page
layout. Of course, web development used to go into supporting a level down in HTML for people
using things like Win 2000/95-ME. Sadly, we have gotten too ‘hip’ lately…
Newer lightweights like Midori came along during CSS3/HTML5 support in which I’d hope NetSurf evolves
into as well. But, in other news…
A PDF version may help versus rebuilding things for backward HTML compatibility (unless it is just a button push)…
Lately? 
HTML5 is already old enough that it’s well supported by most browsers.
Now if the documentation would be made compatible with readthedocs, maintaining it there would allow the users to always compile the latest PDF version when they need it, by clicking a button/link.
How we talking about? The Tour is no online doc, it is a Tour on the haiku image for the first steps with haiku. If you install haiku, you only have netpositive on your System. And we can bind the Tour on this Browser only.
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Hello guys!
Actually, Webkit doesn’t support non SSE2 processors (Pentium III and AthlonXP or older). As a workaround to this situation, there was a discuss in the Haiku mailing list about shipping an alternative browser, probably NetSurf:
Taking this point in consideration, maybe we can considerate compatibility with that browser.
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Add to that, as fast as Netsurf is at HTML4… it’s probably faster than preloading with JS in Webpositive+
This is just a fact of life that a browser with much less features is much faster for what it can do.
Just make a PDF too!?
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I have the tentatively final version ready now, implementing some of what has been mentioned here. See the master at github.
Any more comments (without mentioning JS…)? 
Very good work…
on the last slide a goto “start the tour” is missing!?
You should add that any image file like Iso and bfs can be mount by double click
I added a real “end of tour” slide so users have no doubt they reached the end. I added a “Re-start tour” button and moved some of the text from the start slide to it.
Isn’t that a bit too much of a detail? I’d expect the user to try double-clicking an image icon anyway when they try to access it. Also, the “mounting” slide is already pretty long. I’d like to avoid adding to it if possible.
But it is a knowable haiku issue