Re: And feedback on designing an online help system?

[Jason Rodrigues <..hidden..>]

On Friday 16 March 2007 05:59, Ed W wrote:
> Hi
>
> > 2)  "tooltip" description for specific widgets on the screens.
> >
> > Any other thoughts?

Perhaps nodes can be tagged with special classes?

And an option, either inline on the page, or on the menu frame, can turn on 
the tooltips (like, Balloons in MacOS  <= 9.0)

All it would do is active some javascript that inspects the node under the 
pointer, runs var help_topic_ids = /(hlp_\w+?)/.exec(node.className), 
(className so we can reserve id= for scripting purposes)
And then via AJAX, frames or whatever, queries a locale-specific short help 
string, and optionally offers a link to a full longer description (in the 
manual, perhaps?)

I think this will simply the layout for the html templates, and give us 
flexibility to update all the online help without having to chase down each 
individual template and script that embed help strings.  It'll also let use 
reuse hlp_\w+ identifiers on the same form, and across other forms w/o having 
to duplicate the tooltip string.

Jason