Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 02, 2005 09:24 AM
I think this article misses the point.
The reason there are not many help authoring tools in the F/OSS world is that having a yet another incompatible file format is a waste of time.
Help files are functionally a subset of HTML and there is no advantage in treating them differentally. HTML is portable to numerous platforms, is well known and has a vast array of tools available for it.
Packaging of existing HTML authoring tools in a way that helps help authors might be worthwhile though - something that includes one of the many existing indexing and search tools and also includes a tool for managing a large number of context sensitive help links from application to HTML.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Help Authoring Tools = HTML Authoring Tools
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 02, 2005 09:24 AMI think this article misses the point.
The reason there are not many help authoring tools in the F/OSS world is that having a yet another incompatible file format is a waste of time.
Help files are functionally a subset of HTML and there is no advantage in treating them differentally. HTML is portable to numerous platforms, is well known and has a vast array of tools available for it.
Packaging of existing HTML authoring tools in a way that helps help authors might be worthwhile though - something that includes one of the many existing indexing and search tools and also includes a tool for managing a large number of context sensitive help links from application to HTML.
#