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Andy McAleer wrote:
> Does anyone have a vision, however sketchy,
> of the future of online help?
I think the future of online help (and HATs) is plain-vanilla using web
standards and open-source tools - not the latest doodad from Adobe or
Microsoft. As a software user, lately what I really appreciate for
online help is a set of zipped html files with a navigable TOC. I don't
want to log onto your server just to read Help; I want it locally.
As a consultant, I recently invested some time in learning how to
create help (and other outputs) with open-source tools. I figure if
that business model is good enough for IBM, it's good enough for me. I
recently declined a short-term job because, among other reasons, I
would have had to purchase a new copy of RoboHelp, and it just wasn't
worth it. Right now I'm on a DocBook kick, and it seems to be paying
off. With DocBook I can create HTML, pdf, chm, rtf, Eclipse help, and
more.
DocBook is nice for now, but there are probably simpler tools on the
horizon that will make use of the XML outputs from MS-Word or OO.org.
DocBook is nice because you can produce a set of HTML files with a
navigable TOC, and it's easy to put that into a frameset with a
left-pane TOC for a pure HTML help system. That works well for small to
mid-size help systems, but for larger systems I'm looking into ways to
provide search and index a la Web Help.
It's made with XUL, so it's browser-dependent for the time being. The
Mozilla help viewer efforts seem a little fragmented across the various
Mozilla projects, but the Firefox viewer is nice. If more browsers
supported XUL, it could become a web help standard. Somebody needs to
write an XUL plugin for IE (which would also be the beginning of the
end for IE).
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