Hi, are there better alternatives for JavaHelp for usage of HelpSets in netbeans- platform-based apps?
For existing platform apps migrating to version 9 it should be easy to add the old JavaHelpSystem sice there is established an alternative to migrate, isnt it? best regards Oliver > Hello Jan. > > 2017-11-09 0:17 GMT+01:00 Jan Tosovsky <[email protected]>: > > Btw, what is the source for NetBeans help? > > XML files. Like those at https://github.com/apache/incubator-netbeans/tree/ > master/usersguide/javahelp/org/netbeans/modules/usersguide > > > Some content is now distributed as JavaHelp, some is hosted here: > > https://docs.oracle.com/netbeans/nb82/netbeans/NBDAG/gs_ > > nbeans.htm#NBDAG111 > > > > From my point of view: > > > > JavaHelp > > + context sensitive help > > + search capabilities > > - HTML 3.2 with very limited CSS support > > - ugly UI > > JavaHelp is an old unmaintained crap. That is for sure. On the other hand > it is a standard defining format that users of NetBeans Platform use to > register their own help sets. > > > HTML based help (e.g. DocBook WebHelp) > > + HTML5, responsivity > > + search capabilities using Lucene search index > > > > - context sensitive help needs a special handling: > > (a) a special mapping 'context ID -> URL' is required > > The mapping is defined by JavaHelp XML files like https://github.com/apache/ > incubator-netbeans/blob/master/usersguide/javahelp/org/netbeans/modules/use > rsguide/map.xml and > https://github.com/apache/incubator-netbeans/blob/master/usersguide/javahelp > /org/netbeans/modules/usersguide/ide.hs > <https://github.com/apache/incubator-netbeans/blob/master/usersguide/javahe > lp/org/netbeans/modules/usersguide/map.xml> > > (b) as opening a browser and passing an URL with a fragment identifier > > > > is buggy in Java, a special strategy has to be employed > > > > If the help source was DocBook, that WebHelp output could be generated > > quite 'easily'. But in this case I'd rather recommend my fork (yet to be > > distributed on GitHub) without jQuery/jQueryUI dependencies and with some > > additional features (responsivity, breadcrumb). > > If we could process the existing .hs and map.xml registration files, then I > would more than welcome replacement of the ugly JavaHelp UI with something > more fresh. > -jt
