Re: Indicating topic in TOC

[Paul Goble <pg -at- pgcommunication -dot- com>]

Michael Priestley wrote:
>I'm a strong believer in always surfacing topics in the TOC.

I'm starting to see the wisdom of this. TOCs get used for things
other than just navigation. For example, RoboHTML uses the TOC
to traverse the topics when generating a printed version of the 
help. Any topics not in the TOC wind up at the end. I've also
used (and sometimes written) home-grown text-processing tools that 
use the TOC as a guide for processing all of the topics in a
reasonable order.

Back to Chuck Martin's question:
>if a user is viewing a topic that is not in the TOC and 
>clicks the control to open the TOC. In this case, how should
>the TOC appear?

As a user, I'd expect the parent topic to be highlighted.
The behavior I've seen in Microsoft HTMLHelp is that the 
last-highlighted topic stays highlighted.  Ideally, topics 
would be "virtually" highlighted when the TOC pane is closed, 
so the right thing would be highlighted when the user opens 
the TOC pane.  

--
Paul Goble





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