The "Content Wrangler's" "vision" of FrameMaker?s future is fatally flawed. It would do little to improve the quality of on-line help, or increase the penetration of FrameMaker into the on-line help market.
Some years back, I wrote an article entitled "Thoughts About On-Line Help", which is still available at: www.microtype.com/resources/articles/OLdocs-DE.pdf I still stand by most of the criteria and conclusions discussed in that article, and very few. if any, on-line help documents today come anywhere close to meeting those criteria. THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM WITH ON-LINE HELP is that it delivers the content in HTML, XHTML or XML.This means it relies almost solely on the canonical simple cross-reference link: xlink:href="students.xml" to implement the hypertext capability. NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Although the XLink standard defines some additional link types, none of them are now implementable in FrameMaker, and few, if any, web browser or on-line help products have been updated to support those additional XLink capabilities. BY CONTRAST, FrameMaker (since the early 1990s) implements, in addition to the canonical cross-reference link, 23 robust types of hypertext links, including: GoToLink, Named Destination, Alert, Alert with Title, Go to URL (launches browser and displays the specified web page), Jump to Page Number, Jump to Previous Page, Jump to Next Page, Jump Back, Jump Back and Fit to Page, Open Document, Open Document and Fit to Page, Open Document as New, Open Document at Page Number, Pop-Up Menu, Button Matrix, Message Client (communicates with other applications and creates a link to a URL), Close Current Window, Close All Hypertext Windows, and Exit Application. Some of these link types (Alert, Alert with Title, Pop-Up Menu, Button Matrix) require part of their implementation to be accomplished on reference pages. In addition, it should be possible to use the reference page methodology to implement all of the link types defined in the XLink standard. By inserting graphic buttons with embedded hypertext commands on FrameMaker master pages, navigation bars can be easily implemented. I?ve implemented large FrameMaker hypertext documents in which such master-page navigation bars were used to provide buttons such as "Global" (clicking on this button produced a menu of links to major subject areas, plus hypertexted tables of contents, indexes and glossaries), Local (clicking on this button produces a menu of links to locations within the current subject area), Previous (jumps to the location of the previous link), and Next (goes to the next page). UNFORTUNATELY, nearly all of FrameMaker?s linking capabilities are not convertible to PDF, HTML, XHTML or XML. The only viewing software that implemented all of them was the now-defunct FrameViewer product. WHAT I PROPOSE INSTEAD is that Adobe provide a new version of FrameMaker that includes (in addition to all the existing link types) the new types specified in the XLink standard, and also provide an upgraded version of Acrobat that can, when a FrameMaker file is saved as PDF, preserve all those link types. PDF has already become a de-facto web standard because of its superior readability, bookmarks, thumbnails, and forms capabilities. Adding all of FrameMaker?s superior hyperlink capabilities to PDF would vastly expand penetration into web content and on-line help development. And FrameMaker would replace Robohelp, Winhelp and similar products as the publishing system of choice for delivering web and on-line help content as PDF. Dan Emory & Associates FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing <danemory7224 at sbcglobal.net>
