Executive Summary:
You can use JScript to write a pop-up function to provide help information in your HTML Applications (HTAs). To create a context-sensitive Help pop-up, you have to assign each form element an ID attribute. Also, each form element that needs a context-sensitive Help pop-up has both a Case clause and a Help pop-up function. |
I always try to include some type of Help feature within each of my HTML Applications (HTAs), and until recently, I was using a very basic approach to display a Help screen within each application. The Help screen was initiated by the onhelp event from within the HTML <BODY> tag (i.e., <BODY onhelp="ShowHelp" >). In this case, ShowHelp referenced a subroutine that would run when the user pressed the F1 key. The ShowHelp subroutine that I wrote used a MsgBox function to display helpful text and instructions for the user. For some applications, I provided basic help information, but for other HTAs I provided much more detailed help text and instructions. Regardless of how much detail I put into it, the help that I provided was limited to the functionality that a message box could provide, which was basically a lot of text with a few Visual Basic (VB) carriage return/line feeds thrown in to make it look a little better. Furthermore, I could provide only one Help screen for the entire application. This method worked fairly well for most applications, although there was a good bit of reading in some applications and the user was required to close the message box by clicking OK. . . .
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