For the web application we are currently working on, we will have to think in advance on how to roll it out to a number of different user groups. From a functional side it is important to have a documentation system in place that can be used to generate a user guide and context-sensitive help from the same source files.
We have planned to use DITA as documentation system and are now thinking about an easy and extensible way to let developers specify elements that provide context-sensitive help and can be populated by the technical writers and trainers.
Based on DITA we would like to generate a user guide in PDF and context-sensitive help integrated into a JSP-based web application. What recommendations do you have?
We are already in the process of evaluating a commercial application that has the following features
- authoring tool to identify elements on a web page that will be populated with help information
- integration with learning management systems
- support for applications that are not web-based
Do you have any framework recommendations? In addition to the above, the following would be great
- integrate with DITA (in any conceivable way)
- user group specific content (user retrieved from web application)
- can be used from within a simple web application to show (html) tool tips
- association of help context with the following hierarchy: application > page > element (HTML id?)