Distributing WebHelp output as Zip and local file security p

[smitchell]

This is not really a problem with the Oxygen Webhelp output, but I'm hoping either someone at Syncro or another user has run into this problem and has a good suggestion for a solution.

We're in the process of testing WebHelp as our primary output for content (in this case documentation for our own software product). Right now it's not hosted on a web server, but we are making some of the docs available as a Zip download of WebHelp. Users can unzip on their local box and access it through the file system.

Chrome and Firefox apparently have applied a tighter level of security for JavaScript in local HTML files that is forcing the web help into frameset mode and causing very weird behavior when users click links -- things are acting like it's a popup window and either prompting the user for an exception, or just not opening altogether. Bad usability any way you look at it.

I've been searching for solutions, and maybe have found one for Chrome (a manifest.json file), but so far haven't found an answer for Firefox. All of this works just fine in IE (will wonders never cease !

Anyone have any suggestions? ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[sorin_ristache]

Hello Sara,

I just wanted to say that newer versions of the Chrome browser and also Internet Explorer starting with version 11 impose more strict security restrictions for JavaScript code in the web pages loaded from the local file system (file:///...), including Ajax calls made in JavaScript code (which the Oxygen WebHelp-Mobile pages use a lot). The solution that I suggest and that will comply with these browser security restrictions (which were added in there for a good reason, generally speaking) is to always load the WebHelp pages from a server like Apache or XAMPP, which for the local computer would look like:

http://localhost:8080/some-server-app-d ... index.html

An alternative is to host the documentation for your product in the form of WebHelp pages on your company server/website. Your installed product will direct the users to these WebHelp pages hosted on your company server/website. Starting with the next version of Oxygen we will facilitate context-sensitive help based on WebHelp pages hosted on a remote server. In your case that would mean that an end user presses the F1 in your installed product and the product opens a specific WebHelp page on your company server/website based on the current context in your running product. The mapping between all possible product contexts and specific WebHelp pages is realized with the help of a mapping XML file generated by the Oxygen application together with the WebHelp pages, when the Oxygen WebHelp transformation is executed.

If you really need to have the WebHelp pages on the local system then I suggest using the frameset version of the WebHelp pages (the index_frames.html entry point) instead of the internal frames version (the index.html entry point) because the frameset version (the index_frames.html file) does not have these JavaScript browser security restrictions.