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I recently undertook a similar project that was just finished. We chose an
HTML help platform that was home grown using (the tiniest amount of)
JavaScript and HTML documents.
The user interface is web-based and makes use of cgi scripts to build
dynamic pages and common formatting elements in the form of header files
and CSS.
Our solution satisfied our requirements of platform independence in viewing
and kept the download overhead low.
We architected the following:
1. Content was created as HTML documents, divided at a topical level into
separate HTML files. Navigation between the files was written into the
docs. In other words, I created a stand-alone document in several HTML
files with navigation between files, as appropriate.
2. The user interface has two access points to the help system: a help
button on each page for topical help and links from all field names to
glossary help.
3. The user interface has hooks into the help system via href links that
call a small JavaScript (that's contained in the common header for all of
our pages). The JavaScript is responsible for opening a new, small browser
window, pulling the appropriate HTML help file in, and putting a title on
the window.
For example, here's how one of the help buttons works:
<a href="javascript:pophelp('address')"><img src="images/helpbtn.gif"></a>
The javascript opened a window and wrote the referenced file to the window.
I've used RoboHelp in the past and have noticed a lot of parallels between
the two systems. I really like that my HTML files have their own navigation
and could be a stand-alone document. I am free to develop help totally
independently of the developers coding the user interface. From a process
point of view, we had to be sure to agree on who gets to name the HTML
pages (because they are called from the user interface by name). We
realized this only after we had several instances of
similar-but-not-quite-the-same names that caused HTTP 404 errors.
I hope this helps. Please let me know if you'd like more detail about our
solution.
--Meg
At 10:39 AM 5/11/01 -0400, Barb Einarsen wrote:
Hi all,
Our new project is a client/server software package. The server runs on
a
Linux box. The client can run on Linux, UNIX or Windows.
We need to decide what tools we should use to develop online help,
online
tutorials/demos and, hopefully, natural language searching/expert
system.
The Questions:
Do any of you currently work on a similar system?
Did you use html help, java help, or 'other' for the online help system?
Is there a platform independent tutorial/demo choice?
Any other suggestions?
Megan Golding | mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- net
Technical Writer | SecureWorks, Inc.
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