NetHelp for HOWTOs

[Stein Gjoen <sgjoen@mail.nyx.net>]

Some time ago I proposed to use NetHelp as a better choice
of reader for HOWTOs under graphical platforms. No Feedback.
So I proposed to make a test case, and here it is:
	http://www.nyx.net/~sgjoen/UpdatedH.zip
packed as a ZIP archive.
Read the accompanying readme file, also available here:
	http://www.nyx.net/~sgjoen/UpdReadme.txt
Original mini-HOWTO is available on my homepage:
	http://www.nyx.net/~sgjoen/home.html


For those who didn't see my original proposal, here it is:

------start-----
About supporting more formats, has anyone thought about supporting
the NetHelp tool from Netscape? It is used as their interactive help
system and is opened up for 3.rd party use. Open a Netscape tool
(Mozilla, mail, composer etc.) and hit F1 you will get the NetHelp
window with the relevant chapters.

More info is available at the NetHelp home page:
        http://home.netscape.com/eng/help/home/home.htm
Tools, documentation and templates are provided, free.

Advantages:
- simple
- navigable
- searchable
- indexable
- medium platform independence
- based on HTML

Disadvantage
- requires javascript to run
- requires java to compile and make the help package
- requires 2 extra tags for making table of contents as well as indexing
- uses a slightly odd structure, such as no text under <h1> tags.
------ end -----

Other advantages:
 - customisable
 - offers means of connecting to related documents

The markup is based on the HTML output from my copy of
SGMLTools 1.0.9 LinuxDoc DTD. While the modifications
are not hard it is rather tedious and the slightest
mistake will end in cryptic error messages. Also the
markup was based on templates provided by Netscape.
The Updated mini-HOWTO is small but it took me two
nights to add markup and debug; it is not feasible to
do it by hand for larger HOWTOs.

I feel this is the platform that offers the most features
and is the best justification of the SGML platform we use
to write the HOWTOs. We will however need proper tools to
automate this.

Comments?

Regards,
   Stein Gjoen


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