Re: On-line help for SGI

[Chet Ensign <Chet_Ensign%LDS -at- NOTES -dot- WORLDCOM -dot- COM>]

Glenda:

>> ...  SGI's ... Insight was HEAVILY customized by SGI (using the SIT)...
>> Con: Because of the extensive customization, Insight is slower than
>> the base DynaText and uses more memory.)

I don't think that is always true of customized DynaText gui's however. We did
one for customers that was as fast or faster than DT's own interface. The speed
of the interface is very application-dependent.

>> On the bright side, Sun has already picked up DynaText and may well
>> be doing the same thing SGI did (customizing it with the SIT).
>> I know that other big Unix vendors are thinking about it as well.

Yes, they did. EBT and Sun made a big press announcement about that at last
year's Seybold S.F. conference.

Another aspect of this issue that I'll throw into the mix here. EBT has also
developed a product called DynaWeb which is a dynamic SGML->HTML Web server.
You are asking only about online help right now, but should you later decide
that those same documents should be made available over the Internet, you can
do it by.... again ... building a different stylesheet. It turns the structure
in your document into HTML on the fly, as the doc is requested. In other words,
you do not have to go back and reprocess/convert/format & fix the documents
that went into the help system in order to put them on the Web. You just put a
different program on top of them. This spells 'cost-effective' in my book.

To see it at work, just check out the documentation at Novell's Web site:
www.novell.com

best,

c/het


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