Save As HTML , 5.5.6 versus 6.0: Summary of responses

["Stuart Burnfield" <stuartb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a summary of responses about saving from Frame to an early
version of HTML for use in a very simple HTML viewer (actually a
Tcl/Tk widget).

My question:
> I need to prepare simple online help from existing 'how to' topics.
> The Help viewer is a browser widget that is 'frozen' at a fairly
> old version of HTML.
>
> ... I've been dabbling with Save As HTML in Frame 5.5.6. The
> results so far aren't very good, meaning that I can't automate
> enough and must do too much editing of the generated HTML.
>
> - Are the HTML facilities in 6.0 much better than those in 5.5.6?
> - Is it possible to specify a target HTML version, such as "Save
>   As HTML 3.0"?
___________________________________________________________________

Sarah O'K said WebWorks Publisher Pro (~ $US800?) would handle most
of what I want, including mapping Frame paragraphs to HTML tables,
and pattern matching based on regular expressions.

Jan H suggested using conditional text in the source document to
hide graphics and other elements that I don't want output to HTML.

Pat F said for my purposes the bundled WWP Standard in Frame 6.0 is
no better than the Save As HTML I've tested in Frame 5.5.6. WWP Pro
is difficult to learn but very powerful. He listed some HTML editors
that might be easier to use than the options bundled with Frame.

Dave N voted against Word as one of the 'cheap HTML' option as it
creates very bloated code.

Deborah S said: WWP Standard is too inflexible and difficult to
learn. Recommended cheap solution: do as much as possible in Frame
then fixing the resulting HTML in a good freeware HTML editor. If
the budget permits: ForeHelp/ForeHTML has quite nice MIF import and
is recommeded as a help conversion and authoring tool. It has an
option to save to HTML 3.2 or 4.0.

Kathy McC said the time taken to learn WWP and HTML would be more
than repaid in subsequent Help projects, especially for those who
have creative control over their FrameMaker templates (as I do).
She also recommended the WWP Cookbook, O'Reilly HTML books and the
wwp-users@yahoogroups.com group.

Hedley said: "I have just completed an FM --> Microsoft HTML Help
project using this unstructured --> unstructured conversion method
and am delighted with the results.  But it required a LOT of
work -- inescapable, I'm afraid..."

Hedley, Jeremy and Sarah had an interesting discussion about mif2go,
unstructured versus structured documents, cascading style sheets
(CSS) and browser support. This looks useful for the future but is
outside my scope for the moment.
___________________________________________________________________

The problem I started with was whether it is better/faster to code
the HTML from scratch, or to edit files generated by Frame. This
Help system is likely a one-off measure so it doesn't seem worth
spending much more time looking into new tools or workflow (*).

I got the most acceptable results doing very basic mapping in Frame.
Trying to preserve structure and formatting took a lot more time and
tweaking, and caused as many unwanted side-effects as improvements.
I did a test file and I'm now waiting to hear from the client.

The best Frame-only solution in the long-term would be:
- change the templates and update existing documents to make them
  more HTML-friendly
- use conditional text to hide elements that don't belong in the
  Help file
- use an awk script or similar to post-process the generated HTML
- find a more modern Tcl viewer widget that supports HTML 4.0 (or
  maybe even XML). I found a reference to a widget that sounds
  very promising: it is supposed to display the contents of a .chm
  (MS HTML Help) file.

Thanks very much everyone who replied.
---
Stuart Burnfield
Gentoo Communications
mailto:stuartb@tpg.com.au

(*) any other old-timers get a chill up the spine when they see
    that phrase?

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