Writing on-line help?

Subject: Writing on-line help?
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 11:23:09 -0400

Diane Evans has <<... written some simple on-line help files using HTML.
Now, our company is moving towards more robust help files for the software
that we are developing.>>

Actually, there is _no_ solution as robust and generally useful as HTML.
Microsoft's proprietary help formats are always constraining, poorly
supported by the company, and relatively fragile to create (check the
archives to see all the problems with various authoring tools that pop up on
this list*). Worse yet, they often require expensive tools to create--though
you can certainly work productively with the free help software that
Microsoft provides, it doesn't seem to be a common choice among help
authors. In contrast, HTML offers unparalleled flexibility: if you can load
an HTML page from the software you're documenting, then you can use any
HTML-related technology (Java, Javascript, DHTML, etc. etc.) to extend your
help system. Better still, you can create truly platform-independent and
mostly browser-independent help, and you're not dependent on a specific tool
technology to create the files.

* To be fair, the actual help files seem quite robust once you create them.
It's the creation itself that can occasionally be painful.

<<We are looking for a program that can create an index system similar to
the help files in Windows, and that is easily updated as our software
evolves.>>

You can easily index HTML files. If you're working in Dreamweaver, check out
the tools at www.devahelp.com, which also include a search engine and a
utility for generating a table of contents; I'm really enthused about this
product, because it seems to resolve the vast majority of my objections to
Microsoft's help technology. HTML indexer (www.html-indexer.com) is another
indexing alternative that should work with most authoring tools, and that
has received favorable reviews from professional indexers.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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