Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: HTML Help (htmlhelp.xsl) topic ids

["Bradford, Denis" <denisb at rational dot com>]

Boy, is my face red. Apparently HTML Help uses topic ids only used for popup
topics, which we don't care about. To open a specific help topic in a help
file, the application specifies the help file and the topic's html file (not
its topic id) like this:

	Helpfile.chm::/Topic.htm[>Window name] 

But our problem remains, let me try to describe it better:

htmlhelp.dsl's chunking algorithm generates HTML files using names based on
the node number in some tree. From the point of view of creating context
help, the names may as well be random: one day a topic is named c25.html,
and the next time I do a transform, the same topic is c19.html. 

Maybe this doesn't matter if you want to use HTML Help as a standalone
browser. But it seems an impediment to using it for application help. In
order for us to maintain links from an application to specific help topics,
I think the generated files names need to be keyed to something meaningful,
or at least predictable  - say, an id attribute or an external data file. 

Is the solution a style sheet customization, as you say? Either way, I don't
know from dsssl (still trying to get htmlhelp.xsl working), so any light on
the subject would be most welcome. Worst case, I know you're looking at
DocBook's use for online applications, maybe this is an RFE worth looking
at.

"Norman Walsh" <ndw@nwalsh.com> wrote:

>/ "Bradford, Denis" <denisb@rational.com> was heard to say:
>| Any way to code docbook source so that htmlhelp.xls includes topic ids in
>| the generated HTML Help?

>Can you provide an example of what this would look like?

>| We want to to enable context-sensitive calls from an application to
specific
>| help topics. I can't find a clue either in the DTD or the style sheet as
to
>| how this might be implemented.

>It's probably a combination of source document and stylesheet
>customization.