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Kevin McGowan wondered: <<Is anyone familiar with the term "inline help"?...
Basically, my developers are using the term to describe the explanatory text
that appears with each feature of the software. I'm used to calling this
"online help", though that's not exactly what it is either.>>
If you mean help that appears directly in the interface itself, without
having to be called up by the user, the current jargon of choice is
"embedded" help. It may certainly be inline if it comes in the form of an
affordance such as "type dates as YYYY-MM-DD" next to a field for date
information: it's literally in the same line as the label for that field. It
may also appear in a window at the right of a dialog box so that the help is
immediately visible, and nobody has to go looking for it.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_
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