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Subject:RE: Help for Web-based applications - ideas? From:"Hager, Harry (US - East Brunswick)" <hhager -at- dc -dot- com> To:"'Lois Patterson'" <lois -at- dowco -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 16 May 2000 15:12:14 -0400
Lois,
> I'd be curious to hear what other writers are doing for web-based software
products.<
I've written online help for two Web-based applications developed by our
company.
I use Doc-to-Help (D2H) 4.0. D2H is an overlay to Word. With D2H you select
what they call a build target. A build target is the output format. The
build target I use is "HTML Help (Browser using ActiveX)". With this build
target, the user needs the IE 4.0+ browser.
When a user clicks the Help button in our Web-based application, the online
Help panes open inside the current browser window and focus is switched to
the Help panes. The user navigates the help panes, with the help of a TOC
and Index, and closes help when finished. (This is hard to explain and I'm
not sure this is 100% correct but regular HTML help opens its own browser
window. If you are in a Web-based application and you open regular HTML
help, a second browser window opens.)
The unfortunate part of D2H produced online help for Web-Based applications
is that for all practical purpose, context-sensitive help is not possible,
or at least is impractical.
The bottom line is that online help for a Web-based application built by D2H
produces an online version of the entire Word .doc file with its own Table
of Contents and Index as navigation aids. Naturally, one needs to carefully
design the format and structure of a user guide that will be used both as a
hard copy book and as online help.
It's been said here and in other places that RoboHelp 2000, with assistance
from their add-on tool WebHelp, is capable of producing context-sensitive
help. I'd like to hear from those of you who are using RoboHelp on the
difficulty of doing this.
Jim Hager
Deloitte Consulting
Pittsburgh Solution Center
Hhager -at- dc -dot- com
