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Bug 19787 - provide HTML versions of help navigators
Summary: provide HTML versions of help navigators
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: platform
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Help System (show other bugs)
Version: 3.x
Hardware: All All
: P3 blocker (vote)
Assignee: Victor Vasilyev
URL:
Keywords: A11Y
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2002-01-25 14:19 UTC by Patrick Keegan
Modified: 2010-02-18 08:43 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Exception Reporter:


Attachments
help file which contains two <OBJECT> tags to illustrate how <OBJECT> tags look (4.25 KB, text/html)
2002-03-12 20:16 UTC, Patrick Keegan
Details

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Description Patrick Keegan 2002-01-25 14:19:36 UTC
For accessibility and other reasons, it would nice to be able to view the online 
help in a web browser.

From a Jesse Glick email:

"IMO this would be pretty easy to do using XSLT. Just make an XSL 
stylesheet which takes as input the toc, map, and a parameter indicating 
where the CSS should live, and generating HTML contents. (Index would be 
similar.)

"Ant has a <style> task for doing XSL transformations, or you can make 
your own easily enough, however in order for this to be a part of the 
standard build there would need to be a copy of an XSLT processor in the 
extra binaries. XTest is already trying to get xalan.jar in there, I 
guess, so this might be doable.

"Or you could just write a simple Ant task in Java to do the 
transformation directly, no lib required, but this is crude (changes to 
format need to be made in source code rather than a stylesheet)."
Comment 1 Patrick Keegan 2002-03-12 20:13:39 UTC
making a 3.3.2_CANDIDATE, since the FFJ 4.0 release needs html versions of help to meet accessibility 
requirements.

switching to nbbuild to create the scripts. The requirements are:

- a table of contents and index must be created (with proper indentation
for sub-entries)
- links to the TOC and index should be placed at the top of each file
(perhaps directly after the <body> tag)
- <OBJECT> tags should be replaced by hyperlinks to the topic referenced
in the object tag. The text in the hyperlink is taken from the "text"
param. The link is taken from the "content" tag.
- proper resolution of links between help sets
- ability to create a zip file with the merged help (with TOCs and indexes appended the way they are in 
JH 1.1) for
each edition of the IDE.
- ability to create individual zips for each help set (this part may actually be optional)
Comment 2 Patrick Keegan 2002-03-12 20:16:56 UTC
Created attachment 5042 [details]
help file which contains two <OBJECT> tags to illustrate how <OBJECT> tags look
Comment 3 Patrick Keegan 2002-03-14 20:34:40 UTC
Adding A11Y keyword + some CCs
Comment 4 Jan Chalupa 2002-03-19 14:09:38 UTC
Re-assigning from nbbuild back to usersguide. IMO, RE cannot own this
issue at this point.

1. Someone has to precisely specify what should the resulting HTML
code look like, what should be the layout of the pages, L&F, etc.

2. Someone has to write the transformation script or XSLT stylesheet
to convert the original source into HTML.

3. RE can take the script/stylesheet and plug it into the building
infrastructure.

I believe Docs own the first item. We need to find an owner of the
second task.
Comment 5 Patrick Keegan 2002-04-03 14:14:25 UTC
Removing as 3.3.2 candidate, since Gail has indicated that this is not 
absolutely necessary for 3.3.2. Gail, I'm assigning the issue to you 
just to note that you are monitoring what we need to do. If you find 
someone to actually implement this, feel free to reassign it to that 
person.
Comment 6 Patrick Keegan 2002-07-03 19:45:33 UTC
Since the current requirement is to be able to provide an HTML 
version of help *on request* and nobody has yet made such a request, 
I'm reducing the priority and changing this issue to an enhancement.
Comment 7 Marek Grummich 2002-07-22 11:48:17 UTC
Set target milestone to TBD
Comment 8 Marek Grummich 2002-07-22 11:50:49 UTC
Set target milestone to TBD
Comment 9 Irina Filippova 2010-02-18 01:32:39 UTC
It seems that adding the possibility to view OLH in a browser can be useful for the following purposes: people can copy/paste text, view at the convenient font size. Not sure how much we can do for the next release. Probably this issue should be kept open, but the target milestone is TBD.
Do we have requests from users to have OLH viewable in a browser?
Comment 10 Jesse Glick 2010-02-18 08:43:17 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> people can copy/paste text

You can do this in the Help viewer.

> view at the convenient font size.

Surely implementable in the Help viewer. As far as I recall, the font size is adjusted according to the IDE's overall --fontsize setting, if any.

> Do we have requests from users to have OLH viewable in a browser?

Not that I know of. Can probably be closed.