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Subject: The "Ideal" User Assistance Application?
Hi... I've had a number of conversations with various people on this subject .. initially I was very excited about the idea of developing an XML-based UA delivery app that would provide all of the features lacking in the other available apps. This using some common schema and internal XSLT parsing that would generate the topics and navigation (TOC, index, ??) on the fly. Although I still think this would be an interesting project, I think it may have some shortcomings when used for medium to large projects (namely performance). There is something to be said about the current paradigm (used by most UA apps) of defining the topics, and navigation elements as static files that reference each other as needed, then wrapping that up in a nice package. This eliminates the need to choose one data model as the "UA Standard" and moves back to the concept of generating the (XHTML?) files from your source using XSLT or some conversion process. Along these lines, a goal that I can see for this group is to come up with the specs for a new platform independent, open source, user assistance application. This UA app would provide all of the features that content developers expect and rely upon as found in the current Help delivery options, but implements the features properly and completely. Some of the features I'd like to see are .. - This UA app should be natively compiled (C++?), requiring no external components - Supports both compiled and uncompiled content delivery from local and/or remote locations - Familiar content navigation elements such as TOC, Index, Search, and Bookmarks - Content filtering based on user type (or other metadata) - Provision for context-sensitive topic access - Popups and other developer-defined window types - Built-in update mechanism for both compiled and uncompiled content options - Support for all (many?) languages - more I'm sure ... In my mind, it is very important that this UA app be as self-contained as possible. Otherwise, it is very difficult for content developers to be able to rely on their content being rendered properly (or at all). This is a problem for current UA apps that are Java-based, as well as those that rely on the user's default or installed browser. It seems that with Microsoft's recent announcements at the WritersUA conference .. (1) "Vista Help" will not be available to content developers; (2) WinHelp will not be supported in Vista; (3) They are looking for community feedback as to what we want for UA delivery .. this is an idea time for these discussions to be coming about. Not to take this too far, but I could see leveraging mozilla for the content rendering, and clucene as the search engine. This could probably become a mozilla.org project, since really, this is just a very custom web browser. Mozilla provides the environment for plugin development, and already has some nice update capabilities. What do you think? ...scott Scott Prentice Leximation, Inc. www.leximation.com +1.415.485.1892
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