Re: HTML Help

Oliver,

> Hmm, that's not exactly how I imagined to tackle this...

Please note that I am not yet fully done with the framework itself. It 
will all get cleared up as I will complete the transition...

To put things straight I am not planning to spent too much time on 
writing help. I want it simple and usefull at the same time. Less 
bloat more meat ;)

I also don't want to focus on CVS operations themself. I think we can 
utilize the fact that CVSNT now comes with it's own help file and just 
link to that or even the webpage.

I don't want to make a screenshots of each dialog and explain all the 
options one by one because there is a much better and simpler way to 
do this - help popups activated by a "?" button on the title bar of 
each dialogs. A couple of lines of text can easily explain what each 
option does. User doesn't have to and doesn't want to see the 
screenshots in the help files because he can simply see the real 
thing, the dialog itself. Instead, the dialog's help, as I see it, 
explains in generic terms as to what the dialog is doing, some tricks 
and FAQs. That is much easier to maintain and keep consistant.

I also want to have a simple, one-to-one mapping for dialog's help 
files. It really helps when it comes to updating and maintaining the 
files afterwards. 

> I simply associated each dialog with an explicit URL (in contrast 
> to something auto-generated from the dialog resources or whatever) 
> inside the help file and each control on those dialogs worthy of 
> documentation with an anchor inside that associated file (still 
> allowing an individual override for links to other URLs as well). 

This is the same thing. In the HTML project file you create aliases 
that link to whatever location in the help. The auto-generated part 
just makes job easier because it allows to use symbolic names simliar 
to the ones used in the code for that mapping. The files function 
should be obvious from the name while the mapping makes it clear where 
the files are used.

I am not sure what you mean by "override" here...?

> This way our documentation writer could pretty much just hack away
> without caring about the implementation details in the app while 
> I kept the links up-to-date.

You can still create documentation separately, e.g. the writer doesn't 
care where I link his files from. But it helps to keep documentation 
close to the software structure, particularly in our case.

> For now I have updated the files at the link I supplied.

What about the .hhp and other project files? Can you zip all files as 
they are and upload that too?

Best Regards,
Jerzy



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