|
|
|
|
By Eddie McHam, STC Boston Chapter (formerly of the Lone Star Chapter)
eddiemcham@attbi.com
http://www.eddiemcham.com
The Single-Sourcing seminar was quite interesting, as I had to decide the day before whether to go the new Quadralay WordHelp route or stick with the tried-and-true Frame/WWP route. I have to confess I much prefer Frame over Word simply because Word tries too hard to do my thinking for me, whereas Frame gives me the total control I want over my documents. I've also had a far easier time converting to HTML with WWP than with other tools such as RoboHelp. So I'll admit to a bit of a bias up front.
This seminar gave me a chance to see if I'd made the right choice for my new employer. For the record, I am developing professionally printed manual for a packaged software application. In addition, since one of our customers is the U.S. Government, our HTML documentation must be Section 508-compliant. The decision was also made to use plain HTML 4.0 with CSS—no frames, no JavaScript, nothing else. Initially, since Word was widely used among other groups in the company, I thought WordHelp might be the way to go. It operates much like its Frame counterpart, WWP, yet for roughly half the price of WWP Pro, with the added benefit of not having to spend additional money on Frame.
I had already downloaded and walked through the trial version before attending the seminar, so I already had a few questions to help me in my decision-making. I was highly impressed by WordHelp's ease of use, as well as the informal, Q&A nature of speaker Jesse Wiles, of Quadralay Corporation, and his presentation.
In the end, however, WWP Pro for Frame had one thing that WordHelp did not (and that made my decision for me)—an accessible HTML template. This template provides Section 508-compliant XHTML 1.0, which, loosely defined, is simply HTML 4.0 forced to adhere to the strict validation rules of XML—an added bonus as far as I was concerned. I have since heard that a future version of WordHelp will have the accessible template, along with the other HTML and XML-based templates that come with WWP.
So now, fast-forward to present-day. I've been at my new job since early October, and in the few weeks I've been there, I've already completed a first draft of a printed Installation Guide. And then I used that Frame book as a guinea pig so I could build my WWP project file, based on the accessible HTML template. I now have a nice, basic HTML document set, completely single-sourced from the Frame book. Since upgrading to WWP Pro 7, I have also found ways to control how my HTML doc files are named so the JSP developer can make context-sensitive help files out of the HTML docs. I have tested the HTML docs on an IBM screen reader—let's just say it works too well and leave it at that. OK, I'll give you the short and simple: the screen reader DOES read everything -- from top to bottom, left to right....just like it's supposed to. Which drove me (and probably the co-worker sitting next to me) nuts, so I turned it off!
Recommendations: If you must use Word and want to use a way-cool browser-based Help system like WebWorks Help, get Quadralay's WordHelp.
If you're like me and need something a bit simpler (i.e., plain HTML 3.2, Section 508-compliant HTML, or XML), you have two options: either shell out the extra dollars for Framemaker and WebWorks Publisher Pro 7, or (assuming Quadralay keeps its promise in early 2003) wait for a new version of WordHelp that should have those same templates.
Happy single-sourcing!