RE: [docbook-apps] Autodesk Web Help

["honyk" <j.tosovsky@email.cz>]

Hello,

> > There is a navigation with well known buttons
> > Contents/Index/Search/Favorities, but interesting is also the
> > document window. There are small forward, back and top links with the
> > appropriate tooltips as well as Show in content, Add to Favorities and 
> > Home links. In the header there is also clickable full logic path to 
> > the given page.
> 
> It's just matter of generating a little bit of fancy Javascript code.
> Also while in general I agree that result looks nice, some features are
> not general but tied to a specific content -- like this
> Concept/Procedure/QuickReference tabs for Autodesk.

yes, I agree that most of the job can be provided using decent CSS styles
with a little Javascript code. 

The most challenging features are, from my POV, searching capabilities
(index & full-text search) and handling of Favourities.

Autodesk uses in its products some solution from http://www.isys-search.com/
but I don't know if this has something to do with this help. 

In the open source world something like this could be sufficient:
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ but it requires Java container, hosting of
which is more expensive than e.g. PHP.

In HTML Help these features are already built-in what is, of course,
reflected by Autodesk - in the page header there are suppressed Show in
Content/Favorities/Home links.
 
> In fact for one customer who insisted on using DITA we have modeled
> those tabs as separated topics which were linked together using
> reltables. Similar functionality could be achieved by DocBook
> assemblies currently discussed in DocBook TC.

Hmm, I've thought I would use subsections with the specified role attribute.
Although this is not recommended, it would ensure backward compatibility.
Till now I have no serious reason to abandon db v4.x.

Regards,
Jan

PS: Nice to see there is GSoC project for this topic already ;-)