RE: Two cool tricks for Web-based Help

["Rowena Hart" <RHart -at- ACDSystems -dot- com>]

Hi Geoff, all,

One clarifier to Geoff's excellent tip: The page.asp/page-help.html
convention only works if the ASP page contains static content. If the
ASP page contains dynamic content (i.e. the info on the page changes
depending on a user choice, such as an option from a drop-down list) the
convention breaks down.

I'll give you an example to clarify what I mean. We used the
page.asp/page-help.html convention for a financial application.
Everything worked fine until developers started creating dynamic pages
for buy/sell transactions. In other words, the content of the pages
changed completely depending on the type of transaction that the
customer selected from a drop-down list. Our only solution, at the time
anyway, was to hard-code links to the appropriate help file.

If anyone has a work-around for dynamic ASP pages please share it!

Cheers,

Rowena

Technical writer, ACD Systems, Victoria, BC, CA
Instructor, SFU Technical Communication Certificate
Advisor, SFU Writing & Publishing Program 
Master of Arts (distributed learning), Royal Roads University

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> techwr-l-bounces+rhart=acdsystems -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com 
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+rhart=acdsystems -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- c
> om] On Behalf Of Geoff Hart
> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 5:46 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Two cool tricks for Web-based Help
> 
> Thought I'd pass along a couple cool tips related to file 
> management and Help topics in the context of Web pages. The 
> first one, first described (in my experience) by Colin Dawson 
> (www.info- action.com.au), is so simple it's positively 
> brilliant. Here's the example Colin gave:
> 
> If your Web pages are ASP files, you'll be generating a 
> series of Web pages with names like "file.asp". Rather than 
> obsessing over map IDs and how to pass those along to the 
> developers so as to make the help context-sensitive, you 
> develop a standard naming convention: use the identical file 
> name, but replace the .asp with .htm for the help file's 
> name. Away goes any need for a map file and numerical map IDs!  
> This approach is easy to extend: if the files produced by the 
> developers end in .htm, you add a small tag to the help file name:  
> thus, for page.htm, the Help file becomes page-h.htm or 
> page-help.htm if you don't feel the need to be concise.
> 
> Obviously, what this lets you do is work a bit more 
> independently of the Web developers (i.e., no need to 
> exchange and verify map IDs) because the naming convention is 
> simple, consistent, and easy enough for even a developer to 
> use. <g> Of course, you still have to do some QA, but much 
> less than with map files because it's harder to undetectably 
> screw up an alphanumeric name than it is to mistype a simple 
> number, and easier to catch the error. I imagine the same 
> approach could be extended to conventional (non-Web) software 
> too, with a bit of fudgery to make the plumbing work: so long 
> as each screen, window, or dialog has a name, you can add -h 
> to the name of the help topic.
> 
> This first tip comes from a summary of an presentation by 
> Colin at the last STC annual conference, in which he 
> discussed the use of Flash files (loaded from pages named as 
> described above) to present the online help. That's the 
> second trick. Not enough details in the summary for me to say 
> much more, but basically this approach takes advantage of the 
> fact that Flash is more standardized than HTML plus 
> javascript, and thus behaves more predictably across browsers 
> and platforms, because one company (formerly Macromedia, now 
> Adobe) controls development of the reader. But there are 
> other cool things you can do with Flash that are trickier to 
> do in HTML plus its add-ons.
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --
> 
> Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
> 
> (try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
> 
> www.geoff-hart.com
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> 
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