Is RH RoboHelp is not in compliance with any existing standards

Report · Nov 07, 2007

I've been told the following about RH7 and wonder if it's true. I would appreciate it if someone in the know could respond.

"RoboHelp is not in compliance with any existing standards.

RoboHelp uses a non-standard variant of HTML adding it’s own proprietary tags that may not be supported in any other editor. RoboHelp also uses standard tags in odd ways such as embedding P tags inside all tables and lists which is a non-standard practice but is necessary for the RoboHelp WYSIYWYG to work. "

I am particularly concerned that the output Help documentation be web accessible.

Thanks for the advice.
JL

Report · Nov 07, 2007

To those who rail against RH for adding code to assist the help author: SO WHAT?

Seriously, the output works just fine in Web browsers.

Good luck,
Leon

Report · Nov 08, 2007

Leon -
thanks for the reply.

What you say is all well and good but when that code is rolled into an app it isn't (WAI) web accessible - a MAJOR consideration for U.S. Gov work.

I was just trying to validate the RH7 online help and it failed on simple things like lacking a DOCTYPE and a lang attribute.

Can the code be altered without breaking RH? For example - what if I used Dreamweaver to add to this RH code, or Notepad? If I used an external app to make the code standards compliant, how would that effect how RH works?

Can I jump in and out of the RH editor and Dreamweaver without breaking RH?

I appreciate some input.
jl

Report · Nov 08, 2007

jl,

You can set Dreamweaver as you external editor. Topics will then open in dreamweaver instead of the RH editor. Not really sure about the WAI issue, but it sounds like dreamweaver may be more suituable as an editor in your situation.

Kind Regards
Craig

Report · Nov 08, 2007

jl,

When you select "W3 compliant topics" in the WebHelp setup, the RH 7 topic output files have this as the first line:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

Does this meet the standard? If not, why not?

RH project files, including the topic source files, don't have this line. The project source files are not intended for display on the WWW.

Also, the other .htm output files (i.e., not the topics, but those for WebHelp processes) do not have this line.

Do you see a problem here?

Thanks.

Harvey

(I shot from the hip earlier; the above is correct.)

P.S. I see some other differences in syntax for js and tags, but I don't know enough to make a generalization, beyond this:
The differences apparently remove some RH html code that might not "meet W3 standards." I'm guessing, and maybe Adobe can confirm this, the code doesn't violate any explicit W3 rules, but isn't specifically part of their library.

But I wholeheartily agree with Leon that browsers don't get upset about it.

H

Report · Nov 08, 2007

In RoboHelp 6 and earlier versions, this is largely true. While beta testing RoboHelp 7, I saw many improvements in code. I don't have a production copy of RoboHelp 7, so I don't know how well the finished product does in regards to accessibility.

Be aware, as you test RoboHelp or any other Help Authoring Tool, that tools that meet the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium don't guarantee accessibility. For example, an entire Web site can pass an HTML validation test yet be partially or entirely inaccessible due to issues with JavaScript.

Report · Nov 16, 2007

This is a false propaganda. I am sure this came from a RoboHelp competitor. RoboHelp generates clean HTML code and has got rid of Kadov tags in RH7.

regards
Vivek

Adobe Community

Is RH RoboHelp is not in compliance with any existing standards