WebHelp Responsive System

WebHelp is a form of online help that consists of a series of web pages (XHTML format). Its advantages include platform independence, ability to update content continuously, and it can be viewed using a regular web browser. The Oxygen XML Editor WebHelp system includes several variants to suit your specific needs. The WebHelp Responsive variant features a very flexible layout, is designed to adapt to any screen size, and is available for DITA document types.

This type of WebHelp system can be generated by using the DITA Map WebHelp Responsive transformation scenario.

Layout

The layout of the WebHelp Responsive system is platform independent and is able to adapt to any screen size. It is highly customizable and relies on a template mechanism that allows you to control the position of various functional template components to suit your particular requirements.

You can select from several different styles of layouts (for example, by default, you can select either a tiles or tree style of layout). Furthermore, each of these layouts include a collection of skins that you can choose from, or you can customize your own.

WebHelp Responsive Output on a Normal Screen

WebHelp Responsive Output on a Narrow Screen

Search Feature

When you enter search terms in the Search field, the results are displayed in the results page. When you click on a result, the topic is opened in the main pane and the search results are highlighted.

The Search feature is also enhanced with a rating mechanism that computes scores for every page that matches the search criteria. These scores are then translated into a 5-star rating scheme. The search results are sorted depending on the following:

  • The number of keywords found in a single page (the higher the number, the better).
  • The context (for example, a word found in a title scores better than a word found in unformatted text). The search ranking order, sorted by relevance is as follows:
    • The search phrase is included in a meta keyword
    • The search phrase is in the title of the page
    • The search phrase is in bold text in a paragraph
    • The search phrase is in normal text in a paragraph

Rules that are applied during a search include:

  • Boolean searches are supported using the following operators: and, or, not. When there are two adjacent search terms without an operator, or is used as the default search operator (for example, grow flowers is the same as grow or flowers).
  • The space character separates keywords (an expression such as grow flowers counts as two separate keywords: grow and flowers).
  • Do not use quotes to perform an exact search for multiple word expressions (an expression such as "grow flowers", returns no results since it searches for two separate words).
  • indexterm and keywords DITA elements are an effective way to increase the ranking of a page (for example, content inside keywords elements weighs twice as much as content inside an H1 HTML element).
  • Words composed by merging two or more words with colon (":"), minus ("-"), underline ("_"), or dot (".") characters count as a single word.
  • Always search for words containing three or more characters (shorter words, such as to or of are ignored). This rule does not apply to CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.

Note

For DITA content, if you have topics that are referenced multiple times in your DITA map structure, they will be found by the search engine that same number of times in the search results. The first occurrence will have a Similar results link displayed below the search result and clicking this link will display the other occurrences. Note that the content may be different in some of the occurrences if they have different profiling applied than the others.

HTML tag elements are also assigned a scoring value and these values are evaluated for the search results. For information about editing these values, see Editing Scoring Values of Tag Elements in Search Results.

This output format is compatible with the most recent versions of the following common browsers:

  • Edge
  • Internet Explorer (IE 8 or newer)
  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Safari
  • Opera

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