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Subject:Re: HTML HELP - Benefits? From:Tim Altom <taltom -at- SIMPLYWRITTEN -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:49:34 -0500
>
>I'm in a two person doc group, and we disagree about the need for HTML
Help.
>I'm all for converting our Winhelp and HTML to HTML Help, and my colleague
>is against it.
>
Although each situation is a little different, my general vote right now is
to keep winhelp, and I'm so counseling our clients. Winhelp will continue to
run under Windows for years to come. It's stable, tested, proven, one of the
few pieces of software around that can make such a claim. It has enormous
flexibility, there are lots of people who know how to bolt it together, and
in my mind its abandonment by Microsoft is probably a benefit, because the
software isn't shifting constantly. Even the creation tools for winhelp are
mostly stable and productive.
HTML Help, while it has some benefits of its own (including cross-platform
portability, at least in theory), is, in my mind, far from being stable.
It's also scatter-tech, with more than one standard and environment. HTML
itself isn't particularly stable, and Microsoft's implementation of HTML
Help requires a dll that has been unstable on some of our equipment.
Perhaps in some far future time, both the app and the help file will run
directly in a browser, thus fusing the two and making for the tight
integration that will eliminate many of the problems of applications help.
For now, though, we have enough trouble around here getting things done on
time and on budget using a help format that's well-formed and stable as a
pyramid. I dread the necessity of moving to *anything* that requires a
browser and HTML.
Tim Altom
Adobe Certified Expert, Acrobat
Simply Written, Inc.
The FrameMaker support people
Creators of the Clustar Method for task-based documentation
317.899.5882 http://www.simplywritten.com
