OmniHelp and WebHelp

["Glenn Maxey" <glenn.maxey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Open Letter to Michael Hamilton at eHelp:

Hi Michael,

The world has need for a standard help engine that is cross-browser,
cross-platform, and context-sensitive. An engine that allows technical
writers to create one file (XHTML based) and distributed everywhere. 

Just like Robo<product> has WebHelp: ForeHelp had their InterHelp; Sun
has JavaHelp; Microsoft has WinHelp and HTML-Help; Oracle even dabbled
in the waters of a free help engine.

Just about all of these had these aspects in common:

[*] Anybody developing online help to one of these help engines could
distribute the engine freely.

[*] With the exception of Microsoft, all of the products tried to be
cross platform.

[*] All of these companies weren't "selling" these as products. They
were either free or bundled with something else.

Maybe it is because of all of the above that each product has become a
bastard child of all of those organizations. They aren't making money
off of them directly, so they aren't putting money into them either.
(Where is MS HTML-Help 2.0?) It's just a drain on resources. As a
result, those of us who want to use such technology are faced with
something that is buggy and rarely, if ever, upgraded. (WebHelp might be
the exception.)

So my proposal to eHelp is: why don't you open-source the code to the
WebHelp engine? You could let this be the starting point for the
OmniHelp project. (See Jeremy's posting below.)

Benefits to eHelp: you won't have to maintain the code to this bastard
child anymore. And there'll be more eyes available to take it to the
levels where it needs to be for the world's libraries. You'll be
providing the world with a valuable service, and in turn gain mindshare
for the Robo<product> that can crank into this format. Moreover, eHelp
won't be blind-sided by Microsoft, who can move quickly and might just
decide to be more cross-platform.

I admit that the disadvantages are that people might not be as inspired
to purchase Robo<product>, because they don't have to go through your
proprietary bottleneck to get their cross-platform solution. However,
this is the true nature of standards, HTML, and publishing: we shouldn't
be limited by proprietary things.

So what would it take to get eHelp involved with OmniHelp? What would it
take to open-source WebHelp?

Glenn Maxey
Technical Writer
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
1765 West 121st Avenue
Westminster, CO 80234-2301
Tel. +1 303.223.5164
Fax. +1 303.223.5275
glenn.maxey@voyanttech.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeremy H. Griffith [mailto:jeremy@omsys.com]

 
> 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=4915
6
> 
> 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.

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