Re: terminology for variations of HTML-based Help

["Brian, Flaherty" <bflaher -at- INDCON -dot- COM>]

        ... Is there consistency yet?

No!  Many of the standards (such as Dynamic HTML which use a variety of
ActiveX, JavaScript, and ECMAScript controls) are still being developed
and are *up in the air* at this time.

Also note that various *web help* systems are proprietary to the
software companies that developed them.  For example, HTML Help,
developed by Microsoft, uses a proprietary compression scheme to produce
the actual HTML Help.  In addition, Microsoft uses a combination of
ActiveX and JScript (its own JavaScript implementation) to render the
*advanced* features of the help system (such as the Contents, Index and
Search tabs, and associated functions).  NetHelp developed by Netscape
uses its own proprietary compression and JavaScript technology to render
the same features in its web help version.

To add more confusion, JavaHelp, being used and touted by the *Sun
Crowd*, is developed for use with pure Java applications.  RoboHelp via
RoboHTML touts its own WebHelp as a *generic cross-browser* solution
(but I suspect that may use its own proprietary controls; some of which
may not behave as expected in the Big Two browsers [IE and NN]).

You can *equalize* codes and scripts between the two browsers so that
they both can behave the same for a  web site, but that means more work
for developers, since more lines of code have to into checking and
branching (based on the specific browser being used).  As the saying
goes, there's *no free lunch* here!

Here's a quick overview of some other terminology that will certainly
pop-up in your web design travels:

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets (Levels 1.x and 2.x).  Level 2.0 has just
been released and is supported by IE 4.x.  Style sheets are a way of
applying an author's style to a web site (similar to the way various DTP
packages use style sheets).

JScript - Microsoft's version of JavaScript, aka *Microsoft JavaScript
extensions* which may (or may not) be processed by Navigator.

ECMAScript - aka Windows Scripting Host; touted as a replacement for the
old DOS batch language in the Windows 98/NT 5.x + OSs  (you can install
it for use in Windows 95 and NT 4.x).  Think of it as an *Object
Oriented GUI batch language*.  These scripts or scriptlets can be
written in either VBScript of JScript.

XML - Extensible Markup Language; a subset of SGML that will *extend*
the current HTML for designing web pages.  Standards groups are
positioning it as a way to perform database management via web forms and
pages (that is, enabling a way to access and process backend databases
such as Oracle or SQL databases).

XSL - Extensible Style Language; a *CSS* for XML pages and sites.

Sorry to make you even more confused!

Brian Flaherty
ICS, Paramus, NJ (USA)

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