February meeting recap: The Past, Present, and Future of Help Authoring

by Ted Edwins, Public Relations Manager

An eager audience threw off the February blues and ventured out of their high-tech cabins into the snowy night destined for the intimate confines of Room 1304 of the Davis Centre at UW. The reason for this nocturnal migration of technical communicators was to hear Nicky Bleiel, a Senior Information Developer at ComponentOne, recap the history of Windows online Help, including Help Authoring Tool (HAT) milestones. She also demonstrated the latest release of Doc-to-Help.

Nicky has been a technical communicator for more than 12 years. She started her career writing books and producing them in hardcopy format, but she has since embraced online help and user assistance, Web design, single-sourcing, usability, e-learning, and knowledge management. She is currently a Director-at-Large for the STC.

The History of Help

In 1988, Help was a very basic format. Think back to the days of help in DOS. There were no third-party tools available to create help files.

In 1990, WinHelp was developed. Doc-to-Help and RoboHelp both made their debuts. Both these products were developed initially as a series of macros that acted upon rich-text format (RTF) and Word document (DOC) files. The products eventually became stand-alone software applications.

Microsoft introduced HTML Help browser-based help in 1997. HTML Help gained in popularity as it could be viewed in any Internet-capable browser. Help developers liked the ability to add the types of functionality to their Help systems, such as Dynamic HTML effects, that began appearing in Web pages.

For many years, HTML Help was the defacto standard for Help systems. Then changes begin to occur, usually in conjunction with new versions of Windows developed by Microsoft.

In 2001, Microsoft announces a new Help format called Help 2.0. This new format was used internally by Microsoft for Visual Studio .NET projects but was never released to the general public.

By 2003, Help 2.0 still has not been released to the public despite many rumours. Microsoft concentrates its efforts on developing the next release of its operating system, called Longhorn, and later to be known as Windows XP. Microsoft also tweaks browser-based help.

In 2005, the rumoured release of a new Help system to work with Windows Vista fails to materialize.

The Present of Help

Nicky, speaking from personal experience, made the surprising statement that 32-bit WinHelp is not supported in Vista. WinHelp cannot be run over a network. She advised that if you are still developing for WinHelp, you should migrate to browser-based Help, such as RoboHelp's WebHelp, or HTML Help.

A recent survey of the formats used to distribute Help systems revealed further reasons for abandoning WinHelp. Browser-based help held 77% of the market, HTML Help 50%, and WinHelp 10%.

A new Help system has been developed for Vista. It is called Assistance Platform (AP) Help and has been released to OEMs, but has not yet been released for public use. AP operates according to a client/server model. The content is stored on the web and downloaded to the user as needed. The user can use AP Help on or offline.

AP Help systems are written using MAML (Microsoft Assistance Mark-up Language). The Help is usually organized around tasks and is displayed in a central pane. AP Help can be seen in software applications such as Office 2007.

AP Help replaces HTML Help as the latter is now 10 years old.

Help 2.0 may yet be released to public, but there is still no word on when or if this will actually happen.

The Future of Help

Nicky concluded her presentation by saying that since Microsoft drives the market for Help systems, Help authors must be ready for AP. WinHelp is obsolete and HTML Help will fade away eventually. Microsoft is now doing more usability testing to improve AP Help

She recommended that Help authors become familiar with XML and or MAML to be ready for the future of Help.

About Ted Edwins

Ted Edwins is an independent consultant specializing in software documentation. He is a Past-President of the chapter. In his spare time he continues his futile quest to lower his golf handicap.