>I haven't used the workshop, but I would like to throw in my 2 cents.


There's more than 2 cents worth of text here... :)


>We should NOT be developing help systems in HTML. The older Win95 help system offered better compression, much MUCH better performance, and better ease of use. I've used HTML help systems - they drive me NUTs with the load times and the difficultly/speed of finding things. The 'cutesy' things HTML brings (e.g. animated gifs, etc) could easily be supported in the older, more efficient help system (remember the ability to link in .DLLs that added capability to the help system?). Going to HTML help is simply going to make matters worse from an end-user's perspective - why wade through a terribly slow process to look for something - they'll just never open up the help system.


I'm not too pleased with HTML help as it is now. By biggest complaint is that it needs IE 4.0, and as far as I can tell MS doesn't have a nice lean version for help systems. Or even a zip file of IE for that matter. How am I supposed to distribute it to my users when I can't get it in one file. If you try to download it, it wants to install it right away!

I haven't found it to be any slower than WinHelp, but my help system isn't very big, yet. As to the "cutesy things", I'm not qualified to judge since I don't know what's possible in HTML that wasn't in WinHelp.


>So, I say drop the crappy HTML junk, get something like ForeHelp, and do an efficient Win95 help system (they have an HTML thing too, but I would not use it because it is HTML based). We should make a lot of noise about this crap. HTML help is just another 'thing' that will force more and more hardware and speed to get the same performance of the existing help engine on even a slow (Pentium-90) machine.


I'm using HTML help for two reasons: It's free and that seems to be where things are headed. Of these, the first is the most important. We have no budget for help-authoring software.


>By the way, there is no current way to do a pop-up window in the HTML help system. Pop-ups are not defined in HTML. Of course, pop-ups make very good sense in many situations. So, either go back to the old help system, or you might be able to do something with frames.


I haven't actually tried it, but there are instructions at the HTML Help site for creating a popup.


>Come on people, wake up! Don't just accept this crap from MS. For heaven's sake, if we are developers, why don't we recognize this idiocy? Is it because it is the latest toy to play with? Companies like MS are not going to use common sense, they just want dollars. So it is up to us to make better decisions, and get the message to the companies by using our resources (time/money) on things that are actual advancements and truly useful.


HTML help has a lot of good points. Free authoring tools and ease of use are biggies. I struggled with WinHelp, and even with a shareware program that helped with the RTF coding, I spent hours and got no results. With HTML, I use FrontPage 98 to design the pages, copy them to the HTML Help directory, and I'm set. Making the table of contents is easy. I haven't tried index or search, yet. But I have a usable, if small, help system up and running with only a few hours of work. And most of the work was in writing the text.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't see this as a big money maker for MS. The help compiler is free, IE is free. Maybe they'll sell more FrontPage, but with so many free HTML authoring programs out there, I don't imagine it will make _that_ much difference in sales. So what do they get out of it?

Besides, you can still use WinHelp if you want. It's not like they're going to take it away from you.

-Michelle