Subject: Mystery solved -- crazy-making help files
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 11:06:06 -0400
From: Alison Hodges <ahodges@pingtel.com>
Organization: Pingtel Corp.
To: Rich Schaaf <rschaaf@pingtel.com>
CC: Harippriya Sivapatham <hsivapatham@pingtel.com>,
     Dan Brown <dbrown@pingtel.com>, Ian Butcher <ibutcher@pingtel.com>

Yesterday I was having an issue with checking in automatically-generated
help files. In the (free) users forum, someone else had the same question --
what are these *%@*$% files used for anyway? The answer is, to support
navigation on older browsers ONLY.

So, I am going to delete these files (in any given WebHelp directory these
files are in whdata and whgdata folders) from the various help systems that
are checked in. I'll put this message into those folders as a text file
explanation for future reference.

Alison

You can access the eHelp users forum for the RoboHelp tool at
http://www.helpcommunity.ehelp.com/

Here's the forum posting:

Topic:  Unneeded Webhelp files for RoboHelp 10? (1 of 3), Read 85 times
Conf:  RoboHelp for WebHelp
From:  Joe Levine
Date:  Tuesday, December 18, 2001 12:43 PM

The output files you get when compiling WebHelp are significantly different
with R10 than they were with R9. In particular, you now get these two new
directories "whdata" and "whgdata". The one that concerns me most is
"whgdata" because it's huge. It's adding 1.5MB to my 4.5MB Help system --
that's a third of the total size. The other interesting thing about this
directory is that if I delete it, there's seems to be no effect (at least if
IE5.x or Netscape 4.x is the browser...not sure about IE4 because I don't
have it to test). Does anyone know whether there's any harm in removing this
directory provided you have at least IE4?






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 Topic:  RE: Unneeded Webhelp files for RoboHelp 10? (2 of 3), Read 107
times
Conf:  RoboHelp for WebHelp
From:  Mike Hamilton
Date:  Tuesday, December 18, 2001 01:21 PM

Hi Joe,

Let me shed some light on the files.

Yes, the WebHelp files are definitely different. The reason is all of the
new options for WebHelp. The default, out of the box navigation selection is

to first try using DHTML Navigation. If that fails then the Java Applet
navigation is tried. If that fails then the brand new Pure HTML navigation
is tried (which I have gotten to work all the way back to Netscape Navigator

Gold 2.0).

The different navigation options available include:

DHTML > Java Applet > Pure HTML (default, most robust WebHelp)

Java Applet > Pure HTML (Gives up DHTML in IE for simplicity)

DHTML > Pure HTML (Great for passing through firewalls)

Pure HTML (Works anywhere, with a slightly different search)


The new files you are finding are for the Pure HTML option. If you don't
care about older browsers, or browsers that can't handle either DHTML or
Java Applets, then you can delete those files (but I would do a LOT of
testing before I shipped).

I personally wouldn't recommend it, but wanted to give you enough
information to make an informed decision.

Michael Hamilton
Product Solutions Manager
eHelp Corporation
mhamilton@ehelp.com


