Premium Skins Request

[alanmcd]

I notice that if I have a TOC topic with no content, that the smartphone premium skin will not compile because it says TOC entries without content are not compatible with smartphone skins.
Is it not possible to make this compatible by making the click action for an empty TOC listing, an expand or contract action rather than a topic open action?

If this is not possible, is there a way to easily still maintain my many TOC (not content) topics and still be able to produce a smartphone website alternative? I don't want to maintain two projects and I don't want to have a lot of TOC empty topics just becuase I need them for the smartphone skin..
regards
Alan

[Tim Green]

Hi Alan,

Elimination of empty TOC nodes is an absolute requirement for the smartphone skins at the moment because of the way they work. Actually, rather than trying to accommodate them for empty nodes it would be better to eliminate your empty nodes entirely, because they are also not that desirable in normal WebHelp. They are a deprecated construct (that is why you can no longer create them directly) and they should really not be used at all. They cause all sorts of problems and you can expect the output formats that forbid them to increase. For example, they are also not allowed in ePub eBooks.

Among other things, users often think that something is wrong when they click on an empty node chapter link while another topic is displayed, because nothing happens. Since there is no content to be displayed, the previous topic remains on the screen and the user thinks their click and selection has failed.

[alanmcd]

I know what you mean but often there's nothing important enough to write about in a heading - it's the body of the topics which contain relevant info - but the structure of the TOC helps direct your attention. I end up with a lot of pages which look like title pages.
Alan