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Make Web Help Context Help work without JavaScript

Posted: Wed May 13, 2015 4:25 pm
by MF_OK
It would be useful to be able to deploy Web Help on a local machine without a HTTP server.
Sadly, Internet Explorer and many other browsers block JavaScript from local files.
That entirely breaks context help.

For this reason and for other script averse situations it would be nice if
Web Help worked fully without JavaScript.

One way to implement this would be to generate a redirection page for each id.
It would redirect to the topic the id concerns using a refresh tag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh

You could even make the tree navigation work without JavaScript.
http://www.thecssninja.com/css/css-tree-menu
Might require extra XSLT trickery to make the current page always be folded open when you navigate to it, though.

Re: Make Web Help Context Help work without JavaScript

Posted: Thu May 14, 2015 11:06 am
by Radu
Hi,

We will look into this but we have quite a lot of Javascript functionality (for example we also need JS for the search part).

If you are using Oxygen 17 to produce WebHelp, the output folder should contain an XML file called context-help-map.xml which maps each topic ID to the corresponding HTML document. So hypothetically you could create an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet, apply it over the XML file and use the result-document function to produce for each ID an HTML document with that redirect refresh metadata in place.

Also in the output folder there is an "index_frames.html", it still uses Javascript in some places but it is better suited for offline use.

Regards,
Radu

Re: Make Web Help Context Help work without JavaScript

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 7:51 pm
by urbanrobots
We also experience issues with JavaScript browser support. We tell people to use FF or Chrome, but our users in China mostly use IE.

Any chance that this will be updated to an optional configuration in a later release?

Thanks,
- Nick

Re: Make Web Help Context Help work without JavaScript

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 4:20 pm
by adrian
Hi Nick,

What specific issues are you experiencing with JavaScript?
Have you tried 'index_frames.html' (instead of 'index.html')?
As my colleague mentioned, if you are working with offline/local WebHelp, this is better suited for that purpose.

Regards,
Adrian