>I've been building some help files. One problem is you can't jump to a specific spot on a page (like you can with HTML). Thus every concept you need to be able to jump to must be on a separate page. Also graphics and multimedia incorporation are primitive or simply not available at all in the help files.
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>The thought then came to me, why do this at all. Why not create a series of html documents and use the internet browser ocx to display them and use that as your help file. Now you can have really nice help files.
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>If you have a table that stores 2 fields one being the help context name and the second the html document and anchor tag, you can have context sensitive help as well via some simple code.
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>Has anyone done this and if so do you have any tips before I dive in.

At the SiteBuilder conference, MS said they were looking to move to compressed HTML for help, replacing the proprietary help file format with a new "open" file format. In this case open means proprietary but the specification is published <g>

The compressed HTML looks a good idea, particularly that the editing engine will automatically re-compress when adding new items. There's also a copmressed index on the file too.

I dont' know when this will be implemented though, but I forsee MS moving the HELP over to IE3 as the browser. This will of course be a "standard" that normal HTML controls can't read, so everyone else will have to play catchup.

MS did say that the standard was in discussion with the W3C to make it a web wide standard, but they might well implement it in advance of ratification.