WebHelp System Description

WebHelp is a form of online help that consists of a series of web pages (XHTML format). Its advantages include platform independence and continuous content update, since it can be viewed using a regular web browser.

Layout

The layout of the WebHelp system is comprised of two parts:

The left section that contains separate tabs for Content, Search, and Index.
Note: If your documents contain no indexterm elements, the Index tab is not generated.

Note: You can enhance the appearance of the selected item in the Table of Contents. See the Customizing WebHelp chapter for more details.
The right section where help pages are displayed.

You can navigate through the content of your output using the arrows in the upper-right part of the page. These arrows allow you to move to the parent, previous, and next topic. The parents of the currently opened topic are also presented at the top of the page.

Note: You can edit the args.hide.parent.link parameter to hide the Parent, Next, and Previous links.

You can use the Collapse all button that is displayed in the Content tab to collapse all the topics presented in the Table of Contents.

The top-right corner of the page contains the following options:

With Frames - Displays the output using HTML frames to render two separate sections (a section that displays the Table of Contents in the left side and a section that displays the content of a topic in the right side).
Print this page - Opens a dialog box with various printing options and a print preview.

Figure: WebHelp Output

Search Feature

The Search feature is enhanced with a rating mechanism that computes scores for every page that matches the search criteria. These scores are then translated into a 5-star rating scheme. The search results are sorted depending on the following:

The number of keywords found in a single page (the higher the number, the better).
The context (for example, a word found in a title scores better than a word found in unformatted text). The search ranking order, sorted by relevance is as follows:
- The search phrase is included in a meta keyword
- The search phrase is in the title of the page
- The search phrase is in bold text in a paragraph
- The search phrase is in normal text in a paragraph

Figure: WebHelp Search with Stemming Enabled

Rules that are applied during a search include:

Boolean searches are supported using the following operators: and, or, not. When there are two adjacent search terms without an operator, or is used as the default search operator (for example, grow flowers is the same as grow or flowers).
The space character separates keywords (an expression such as grow flowers counts as two separate keywords: grow and flowers).
Do not use quotes to perform an exact search for multiple word expressions (an expression such as "grow flowers", returns no results since it searches for two separate words).
indexterm and keywords DITA elements are an effective way to increase the ranking of a page (for example, content inside keywords elements weighs twice as much as content inside an H1 HTML element).
Words composed by merging two or more words with colon (":"), minus ("-"), underline ("_"), or dot (".") characters count as a single word.
Always search for words containing three or more characters (shorter words, such as to or of are ignored). This rule does not apply to CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.

HTML tag elements are also assigned a scoring value and these values are evaluated for the search results. For information about editing these values, see the Editing Scoring Values of Tag Elements in Search Results topic.

This output format is compatible with most of the most recent versions of the following common browsers:

Internet Explorer (IE 8 or newer)
Chrome
Firefox
Safari
Opera

Important: Due to some security restrictions in Google Chrome, WebHelp pages loaded from the local system (through URLs of the file:///... format) may not work properly. We recommend that you load WebHelp pages in Google Chrome only from a web server (with a URL such as http://your.server.com/webhelp/index.html or http://localhost/web_pages/index.html).

Warning: Due to some restrictions in web browsers in regards to JavaScript code, the frameless version (index.html start page) of the WebHelp system should only be loaded from a web server (with a URL such as http://your.server.com/webhelp/index.html or http://localhost/web_pages/index.html). When loading WebHelp pages from the local file system, the frameset version (index_frames.html start page) of the WebHelp system should be used instead (file:///...).