Customizable documentation?

["Geoff Hart" <Geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Roy Jacobsen passed along a query from a co-worker: <<My 
boss... ran across the Fodors Web Site... where he could build 
his own customized travel guide and print it out. He filled out 
a series of questions on what he was interested in, and the site 
built a customer book that he could print out. It contained all 
the information he requested. Is this something that could be 
done with online documentation?>>

In fact, it's probably something that _should_ be done for 
online docs, or at least built into the user interface. Wouldn't 
it be great to be able to turn on "long labels for field names" 
whenever a field label seemed incomprehensible? I'm not 
comfortable with the idea of "a user fills out a survey and 
builds his or her own custom documentation based on their 
role" simply because roles and information needs often 
change, and it's often difficult to remember how to change the 
level of detail in the documentation. Moreover, there are 
times when you really do need information beyond what you 
initially selected, and it might be unpleasant to have to go 
back through the whole questionnaire just to add a single new 
component to the docs.

If you chose this strategy, you should make the 
documentation entirely dynamic, with very prominently 
labeled controls, so that users could easily adjust the level of 
detail to fit the current context, rather than using a single level 
for all contexts. And the process should be easy enough that 
it doesn't pose a barrier to the user actually reconfiguring the 
help.

<<Most importantly, is this something that could be done 
using HTMLHelp?>>

You could certainly program this with a lot of help from 
experienced Java (or other) developers. I'm not enough of a 
Help geek to know whether it's possible for nondevelopers to 
do this easily using existing Help authoring tools. Any of our 
experts have a better answer?

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I 
suspect 
that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)