Design

An overview of webhelp page structure.

DocBook WebHelp page structure is fully built on css-based design abandoning frameset structure. Overall page structure can be divided in to three main sections

  • Header: Header is a separate Div which include company logo, navigation button(prev, next etc.), page title and heading of parent topic.

  • Content: This includes the content of the documentation. The processing of this part is done by DocBook XSL Chunking customization. Few further css-styling applied from positioning.css.

  • Left Navigation: This includes the table of contents and search tab. This is customized using jquery-ui styling.

    • Tabbed Navigation: The navigation pane is organized in to two tabs. Contents tab, and Search tab. Tabbed output is achieved using JQuery Tabs plugin.

    • Table of Contents (TOC) tree: When building the chunked html from the docbook file, Table of Contents is generated as an Unordered List (a list made from <ul> <li> tags). When page loads in the browser, we apply styling to it to achieve the nice look that you see. Styling for TOC tree is done by a JQuery UI plugin called TreeView. We can generate the tree easily by following javascript code: 

      //Generate the tree
$("#tree").treeview({
collapsed: true,
animated: "medium",
control: "#sidetreecontrol",
persist: "cookie"
});

    • Search Tab: This includes the search feature.

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