On 26 Aug 2008 at 7:15, Robert Patterson wrote: > Phil Daley wrote: > > > > Right, that's called "Context Sensitive Help" in Windoze. > > I guess my point is that for documentation to be truly useful, not only > must it be context sensitive, it must be completely integrated into the > program. When Microsoft offloaded online help into MSDN for VB6, the > tight integration was lost.
That's not because it's online help, though, but because MS got lazy. You can just as easily pass a parameter to a web page that indicates the help context as you can pass a Help Context ID to the Windows Help application. If I'm not mistaken, VB6 would also be the time period of the introduction of Microsoft HTML Help, which as so many people observed NEEDED HELP, itself. It was a disaster in Office 2000, so much so that many people I know kept the Office 97 help files and used those manually to look up things that the O2K Help couldn't seem to find. The fact is, the content was still there, it's just that the links between the applications and the content somehow got broken in the conversion. It took until Office 2003 for this to be mostly rectified (though by that time they'd added in offline searches as the default, which I always turn off, since I don't want it unless I the local help files lack the info. I need -- d'Oh!). It doesn't surprise me that MM has gone to real HTML help files after the MS HTML Help debacle. Even MS itself couldn't get it right. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
