JavaHelp pre-beta demo

[Ben Weisner <ben -at- WEISNER -dot- COM>]

Sun's pre-beta release of their Java WorkShop 2.0 has a demo of what seems
to be an early version of their Java-based Help engine.

For those of you who don't want to suffer the agony of an 18 mb download,
I'll summarize a few of the features that I've observed (to clarify, none
of what I'm describing in any way offers an authoring component yet--just
the display of online Help through a Java engine):

Context-sensitivity (F1, Help buttons, pull-down menu)
Appears in its own browser window, not through either of the browsers I had
installed
Reasonably quick display (remember, this is Java)
Expandable book/page TOC via a Java applet. The text file format for the
book/page names and associated URLs seems as simple as the layout of the
.CNT file in WH 4.0
Full-text search across all of the HTML files within the documentation set
(this wasn't working in the version of the pre-beta I had (build 93);
presumably it will be implemented in later versions)
Supports HTML 3.2; since it displayed in it's own viewer, not sure what
browser-specific tags are supported; not sure whether style sheets are
supported (my guess would be no, but I'll experiment a bit to make sure)
Bookmarks and history, of course
Topic printing

This may not seem like much compared to HTML Help, but I'm pretty jazzed
about a healthy alternative that is browser-independent. If anyone else
wants a peek, you can download from
http://www.sun.com/workshop/java/jws20_dev/

Feel free to share any comments, wish lists, observable bugs with me on or
off-line.

Ben Weisner
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