Do we really need a Help Markup Language?
Self on Help
Thoughts from the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee Chair
Is Help sufficiently different from other forms of documentation that it should warrant a specialised DITA? Specialisation tends to be vertical (industry-specific) rather than horizontal (domain-specific). Single-sourcing makes a lot of sense if the Help is viewed as one possible output. A Help specialisation might make single-sourcing of manuals, Web and Help content difficult, although it might make the production of a suite of Help systems easier.
Help for a Windows-based accounting system might require a different information model to Help for a programming language. However, once we start extending Help beyond static documentation to a richer user assistance, where the Help may, for example, automate some software tasks (as in Vista Help's Active Content), the question becomes murkier.
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Do we really need a Help Markup Language?
Yes, Tony, I have also noticed that specialisation tends to be vertical (industry-specific). Since we are not going to change this Help should be a set of extensions to add to each one.
Richer user assistance, where the Help automates tasks or affects the views of the information can be "architected" (figured out) then included in all markups.
..Bruce White..
winhelp.com.au
Hmmm....
I'd rather see specialized processing for standard DITA documents, facilitated by some standard DITA metadata elements and attributes, or processing instructions embedded in otherwise ordinary topic and/or map documents. Then, you get to have your single-sourced reusable cake, and eat it too, with build-time transformation into both active and passive "help" formats.
From what I've read about the Vista "active content" help concept, it seems to be analogous to Eclipse cheat sheets. Without digging into the gory details, it doesn't seem like too big a stretch to transform, say a DITA task into a cheat sheet (or, at least, the main content in a cheat sheet).