Broken links with the new responsive skins?

[Richard Marsden]

I've just upgraded my premium pack for the much awaited responsive skins. Looking good!
I'm currently using the Mango Flat responsive skin as a basis for my help.

I tested the results with the Xenu link Sleuth to find any broken links. This was immediately useful as it found I hadn't updated the canonical URL in the header!
However it is finding quite a few broken links to CSS files, etc. I'm not sure what Xenu looks like to the responsive skin, so if Xenu is reporting as a weird agent that will never be seen in the wild, then this might be a non-issue. In-case it isn't, here are some example broken links:

/myhelp/css/default.css
not found in:
/myhelp/_hm_print_window.htm?example_using_a_selection_set.html
(and lots of other pages of mine after the ?)

/myhelp/fontello.svg?80051225
not found in:
/myhelp/css/fontello.css

/myhelp/hmwebhelp_main_default.css
not found in:
/myhelp/index.html (and other pages)

also /myhelp/images/cicon1.gif cicon2.gif cicon9.gif
all referenced in /myhelp/css/hmwebhelp_toc_default.css


So far everything looks okay visually on the desktop and on a tablet, but I need more testing.

I hadn't used the Toolbox before, but a couple of quick comments. First, the warnings about deleting baggage files and variables are probably useful but quickly get annoying. I'm assuming they can be switched off somewhere? (usually these dialogs have a checkbox actually on the dialog)

I'm also finding my visual and text editors mess with the Toolbox, so that I get the message about a file being deleted or renamed. I see this a lot. I'm not sure of all of the circumstances, but for Emacs, I think it is because Emacs renames the original file as the backup. These messages slow development and confuse me a bit.
Perhaps one solution might be a bulk "pack/unpack" option so that I can browse a directory of Baggage Files with Windows Explorer and use an editor as I see fit?

[Tim Green]

Hi Richard,

The automatic help in PP Toolbox can be switched off in Edit > Preferences. It's on by default because most people are going to need it initially. I made it so in-your-face because I was a little concerned about letting the more advanced functions loose on the world at large...

Thanks a lot for reporting the links issues. Most of them were only marginally relevant but a couple had genuine consequences, even though they were not immediately visible. The default CSS references are actually deprecated and never used, but I've corrected them anyway. Similarly, the cicon icon references are in a fallback version of the TOC CSS that is also deprecated and should never be used, but I've updated those as well. The actual files will be removed in a later update but eliminating them now would entail too much risk of unnecessary errors.

The CSS reference in the print preview template file was outdated and didn't actually have any effect, because the correct CSS file was inserted dynamically. That is actually no longer necessary because WebHelp 3 now always names the topic stylesheet "hmprojectstyles.css", so I've updated the template with a literal reference to that and removed the dynamic stylesheet loading, which saves time and an additional http request. I also removed a spurious old Google fonts reference that's no longer used (saves another request) and updated the print preview for better fidelity to the project stylesheet.

The fontello reference was a genuine gotcha, thank you very much for that: WebHelp 3 puts all graphics files in a graphics folder, and H+M naturally interprets fontello.svg as a graphic and puts it in the ./images folder. The file is actually a collection of the glyphs used for the responsive icons in the user interface. The incorrect reference didn't cause any visible errors because there are several other fallback formats, but the corrected reference should now provide slightly clearer icons in Chrome on Windows.

All the changes will be in the 3.01 maintenance update coming out today or tomorrow at the latest.

I'm also finding my visual and text editors mess with the Toolbox,

Sorry about that, but for the time being at least you will need to use one that doesn't and that will allow monitoring and reading of the files by another program while you are editing. I recommend Notepad++, which is free and ideal for this purpose. PP Toolbox isn't supposed to be a high-end editing tool. This ability is simply a convenience and you need to work within the confines of what is possible here if you want to use this function.

Perhaps one solution might be a bulk "pack/unpack" option so that I can browse a directory of Baggage Files with Windows Explorer and use an editor as I see fit?

Doing that would make it necessary to disable the auto-save feature that saves your edits back to the skin every time a file is changed. And even then the utility would still have problems saving back to the skin if the files were opened exclusively by your editor. And then it would have to tell you to please close the file in your editor before saving, which was a level of annoyance that I absolutely wanted to avoid. For these purposes I felt it was better to simply say you have to use an editor that can open and edit non-exclusively.

[Richard Marsden]

Thanks for the quick and informative replies, Tim!

Glad to be of use with the broken links.
So it sounds like I shouldn't try to fix them but wait for an update.
I've been making a note of the changes I've made to the skin (I have three sets of help - and probably more in the future), so re-applying them to an updated skin shouldn't be too difficult. Updating the header image baggage files might be a little trickier but I think I've worked out how to do it.

I've been looking more closely at things like load speed on my websites, so I'm currently "on top" of things like unnecessary file fetches!

I'll have a look at notepad++. You know how it is with text editors and the "baby duck syndrome" - you use the first thing you see and learning something new is too much of a hurdle!

[Tim Green]

I've been looking more closely at things like load speed on my websites, so I'm currently "on top" of things like unnecessary file fetches!

You should find that topic browsing within the new WebHelp interface is super fast. There is also an absolute minimum of scripts loaded when the WebHelp is first accessed. All additional functions are loaded on demand the first time the user requests them, and then remain available for the rest of the session. Similarly, only the visible branches of the TOC and keyword index are actually rendered in the DOM, and killed again when they are closed. The index and TOC information is in highly-compressed JSON files without any HTML overheads,

[Richard Marsden]

Excellent!

So far I've only been looking in detail at my Wordpress installation, but I need improvements across the board.

[Tim Green]

Hi Richard,

The 3.01 maintenance update is now online. See the help chapter after installing for the brief change log.

[Richard Marsden]

Thanks!

I've got less than 3 hrs before I leave for Christmas, but with any luck I can get it deployed

Have a good Christmas / Holidays!