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Re: seeking online Help technology with specific characteristics
Subject:Re: seeking online Help technology with specific characteristics From:David Castro <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 17 Apr 2001 08:50:10 -0700 (PDT)
Chuck Martin said:
> That said, the Help technology I seek must have the following
> characteristics:
and then he listed a Really Long List of requirements. My response deals with
*some* of the requirements. Here I go again, beating on the JavaServer Pages
drum.
JavaServer Pages would allow you to take care of your most pressing issue,
fairly easily:
> - The ability to display content based on one or more user characteristics
> (different wording in topics, different wording in TOC, different availble
> topics, etc.) [...] all be done with no user intervention or decisions).
I did just this using tag libraries at my last employer. I created tags that
would allow me to include or exclude based on the type of user accessing the
application. (Only include this if the reader is a doctor; only exclude this if
the user doesn't have at least Level 1 security clearance.)
You would combine JSP with the output type you choose. For example, if you
chose to go with WebWorks Publisher to create output from FrameMaker, I'm
remembering that there is a way to create pass-through code snippets in the
output. You could probably script WWP to change conditional text tags in
FrameMaker into JSP tags in the XHTML output. (I'm planning to test this theory
someday....)
> - No extraneous tags in topic files (so anything that runs on top of Word is
> out)
If this means that you can't use FrameMaker's conditional tags or JSP tag
library tags to mark up the content that changes, then how exactly would you
make it conditional?
> - No in-file scripting (instead, reference to external files)
The in-file scripting could potentially be automatic. Even if it isn't, it's
quite minimal. Barely more than a standard HTML tag.
<taglib: seclevel=1>content</taglib>
> - Context-sensitivity from a browser-based appiction (a web page)
It'd be XHTML, which your programmers could hook into. If you were ambitious,
you could even create a page that would allow the programmers to hook into it,
providing the name of the dialog box, and then the page would forward to the
correct page (anything that makes life easier on your programmers, right?).
> - Cross-browser functionality (IE5+, NN4+)
JSP is a server-side thing. It outputs standard HTML. (or XHTML, or XML, or
whatever you're working with)
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