This past Saturday morning I started having a look at DocBook WebHelp format, the main advantages of which are twofold:
- The left menu, a tree layout of the titles, is always available.
- Search is built in.
The initial experiment is easy to do with docbkx-tools, just <goal>generate-webhelp</goal>. (That did not automatically pick up the images and styles, of course.) With the current setup of OpenDJ docs something is wrong in the XInclude resolution for a doc <set>. So instead of having the <set> as the home that contains all docs, I added a simple cover page to my experiment, posted at http://mcraig.org/webhelp/.
The draft Admin Guide has the most content, and so is perhaps the best example.
Having each book in its own WebHelp container leaves something to be desired, but I like the navigation and search. In terms of design, http://docs.redhat.com/ seems like an improvement on the whole idea.
Margin Notes 2.0 