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Re: Context Sensitive (CS) Help in Web Applications
Subject:Re: Context Sensitive (CS) Help in Web Applications From:"MMdeaton" <mmdeaton -at- mmdeaton -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:58:17 -0700
I have not used RoboHelp or any other Help authoring tool in years, but I
have created context-sensitive Help for fields in a Web application. This
resulted is f ield-level help, not just page/screen level Help. I did it
using the <SPAN> tag and its TITLE attribute. We also created page-specific
Help using the ability to include one Web page within another. This allowed
the writers to create the Help text independently from the developers
creating the ASP pages.
How you display this type of Help can vary. We put it on the bottom of the
page because we did not want to open another window and we did not want to
create a frame. The application was an ASP that could be customized and we
worried about clients who already had frames on their intranets.
You can also do it with DHTML so that the user clicks a link or graphic and
the page "expands" to display the Help content. This requires developers who
know how to use both the IE and Netscape approach to DHTML and an assurance
that your customers will have DHTML capable browsers. I was working on
applications that required people to use IE 5, so it was not hard. On an
application where we used DHTML for both browsers, it was a pain in the
butt.
If you have savvy developers or are working in XML, there are lots of
options for automating the process which are doubtless too long to go into
here.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ashu Saini" <asaini -at- ggn -dot- aithent -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 4:34 AM
Subject: Context Sensitive (CS) Help in Web Applications
> Greetings,
>
> We need to develop field level (What's this) Context Sensitive help for
all
> the screens of a Web application using RoboHelp. Is it possible to develop
> this help for a Web based application.
>
> Thanks in anticipation
> ASHU SAINI
>
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