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>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.
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My help systems are usually longer than 60 printed pages. Believe me, HTML help it is MUCH slower. Especially if you use it like a typical user - get help on a specific subject - close it. A little later - get help on a different subject. The load time of the browser is ridiculous - and parsing HTML to display text! Yuck!

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>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.
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I think ForeHelp is around $200 (if you just by their Win95 help system). How much is FrontPage? How much for more RAM and disk space for the development system? I create complete help systems AND printed manuals in a matter of days (the main limiting factor is typing speed). I doubt you'll be able to do the same with HTML Help. ForeHelp also has some very nice graphical displays to help trace links throughout your help system - you might have to buy other products to get that in HTML help. So you might want to look at ForeHelp as an investment that will save time and money in the future.

Before having ForeHelp, I created a help system by hardcoding in an RTF - it was tedious, but not difficult. I'll bet you don't want to go back to that, but if you want, I can give you some pointers.

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>I haven't actually tried it, but there are instructions at the HTML Help site for creating a popup.
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Is there a way to e-mail me the instructions or a link to the page? I'm curious since I haven't seen any codes that imply 'pop-up' in the HTML 'standard'.

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>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.
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>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?
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>Besides, you can still use WinHelp if you want. It's not like they're going to take it away from you.
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The root of the problem is that MS is trying to take things in a new direction that will require more hardware and more 'operating system' resources to get the exact same (and maybe even less capable) functions that already exist. Also, don't forget that MS is trying to force EVERYONE to Internet Explorer. Be careful what you use in their HTML Help workshop - I'll bet there are very specific features that absolutely require IE 4.0 or later (hey, that's one way to blast Netscape out of the picture, huh?). After there are no more competing browsers, we'll see some fees I'm sure. Or, wouldn't you think Windows 98 would be cheaper if they hadn't tried to put all that browser-crap in it? So, perhaps we are paying for IE after all, MS is just hiding it.

Finally, MS could very easily drop support of the old help system. Maybe they will in NT 5.0, or the next version. Again, there is nothing to stop them unless we tell them the HTML help system sucks.

I guess I'm rambling on this so much because I've had extremely bad experiences with what MS is doing to the computing world in general. They've done some good things, but they are now taking advantage of their situation (sort of what you would expect from a monopoly). They make things unstable, force people into upgrading, switch to 'newer' technology which is actually a step backwards, etc.

Of course all this is my own opinion ;-)

-Charlie