A couple of questions about webhelp skins

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appleton
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Nov 26, 2012 3:40 pm

A couple of questions about webhelp skins

Unread post by appleton »

I have a static web age containing several links into my H&M help pages. Some of these links are to anchors that are part way through the help page.

Most of the time these links work OK and the help page automatically scrolls to the correct position. But I was finding that one of the links was only going to the top of the page and would not automatically scroll down to the actual anchor point.

The links from my static page used the # character to delimit the anchor name, so I tried changing them to the "?anchor=" form, and now all of my links seem to work OK.

I remember reading that links when spawning an EWriter process MUST use the ?anchor= format instead of #, but I expected that links to WebHelp would be OK to use #.

Is there a known problem with using # in links to WebHelp, or should we always be using the ?anchor= format for WebHelp aswell as EWriter.

Also, when the user clicks a link from my static web page it goes to the WebHelp page. If the user then clicks the browser back button to return to the static page the page does not change. In fact the user must click the back button 3 times before the static page is displayed - this confused me for a while so I guess it will confuse users too. The WebHelp skin seems to take up 3 steps in the browser forward/back history - is this normal or is there something wrong with a configuration setting in the skins?

The version 6 premium skin I was previously using does not seem to do this - 1 click of the browser back button will return to the static page.

EDIT: Actually the 3 steps only seems to happen in Firefox. Chrome and IE only have the expected 1 step. Weird.
appleton
Posts: 37
Joined: Mon Nov 26, 2012 3:40 pm

Re: A couple of questions about webhelp skins

Unread post by appleton »

OK I found the manual for the Premium skins. It says that you should use the ?anchor= form for WebHelp aswell, so that clears that up.

But it still leaves the 3 back clicks needed in Firefox to return to the static web page.

I'm using Firefox 57.0.4 (64-bit).
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Tim Green
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Re: A couple of questions about webhelp skins

Unread post by Tim Green »

The new Firefox has been completely rebuil5 from the ground up. Not only the browser part is new; it also has a completely new HTML rendering engine, and that is the really difficult part. It still has quite a few odd quirks. We'll look into this one as well... sigh... :?

The issue with scrolling to different places sometimes for anchors is known and is going to be fixed in the next maintenance update. It has to do with the automatic adjustment of the TOC width to the previous user setting when the WebHelp or EWriter is re-opened.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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