On 7 Jul 2007 at 12:42, shirling & neueweise wrote: > it doesn't sound like a bug at all, but a design decision. each > browser "reads" the html differently (IE being the worst, refusing to > follow much of the standard html protocol), but designers usually > create different style sheets that are selected automatically by the > user's browser so that everything appears more or less corectly in the > various browsers; i would have expected that MM would do this and not > actually decide which browser reads their files, that is really > abnormal practice.
Well, Microsoft's HTML Help has to be coded for a certain browser, as it runs using an embedded IE component for rendering. I don't know what it does on Mac. And the files are not HTML, but an encoded form or HTML that is nonstandard and specific to MS's proprietary CHM files. I agree it's bad practice on MM's part. But it might have been a matter of time and effort on their part -- was it worth them "rolling their own" in order to support different browsers? If they didn't have the expertise to do that in-house, it probably wasn't. On the other hand, once they'd built the thing for themselves, it would be a piece of cake to maintain for the future, and completely within their control. Indeed, it occurs to me that a smart way to maintain documentation would be to create a Wiki for your software developers, Q&A and technical writers, and then package up the finished articles as HTML files for distribution with the product. That would make it *very* easy to make changes, seems to me. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
