Re: [HATT] Help As Part Of The Programming Language?

["Jeremy H. Griffith" <jeremy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 17 Aug 2002 07:41:41 -0600, "Don Lammers" <don@smountain.com> 
wrote:

>["Glenn Maxey" <glenn.maxey@voyanttech.com> wrote:]
>>>For me, the issue isn't that Help has a separate engine. The issue
>is, why isn't that engine open-source and cross-platform? <<
>
>The engine is open source. It's called a browser. The code you have to
>create to go from plain browser to tri-pane, and the tools to make it so,
>are what's not open source. And the reason is that nobody has done it yet.
> ...
>So, the question actually is not why, but who would do it, and what would
>motivate them to do it?

Well, actually... we've started a SourceForge project to do that
very job.  Some months ago.  ;-)  As a tool vendor (of Mif2Go),
we felt a need to provide a tri-pane, cross-platform Help viewer.
But rather than duplicate effort to gain commercial advantage,
we decided that we would collaborate with anyone else interested
(including our competitors) to produce an open-source viewer that
anyone could use.  It's licensed under the LGPL so that it can be
built in to commercial products without fee or restriction:
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/omnihelp/

When you go there, you'll see we're still at the "requirements"
stage, with notes for a draft spec at:
  https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=10160&group_id=49156

This is our first public mention of this project, and we'd be
delighted to see active participation by other members of this
group [HATT], and the Framers lists, in particular.

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  (jeremy@omsys.com)  http://www.omsys.com/

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