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From what I can see, traditional context-sensitive Winhelp-type solutions do
not seem very practical on the Web (and they would be quite difficult to
implement). I have yet to see any Web applications that involve field-level
help.
But what type of help system should a web-based application have? My sense
at this point is that each screen can have its own help page, which can be
accessed by clicking a convenient icon, resulting in a new web page opening
up which has been sized and positioned in such a way as not to hide the
actual application. The help web pages can be created in a program like
RoboHELP, ForeHelp, or Quadralay WebWorks, and involve a Java applet to
index the content (so the help system can also be viewed separately). This
is what I am developing.
However, a lot of what one might call web applications have no such help.
Amazon, for example, has a Help icon at the upper right, which leads to the
same list of helpful links no matter where you are in the site. Many web
sites have little or no online help. Clearly, the situation should be
different for a commercial software product which just happens to have a web
interface, but how?
I'd be curious to hear what other writers are doing for web-based software
products.
