Creating Effective JavaHelp

Chapter 5. Creating HelpSet Data and Navigation Files

HelpSet data and navigation files connect the HTML-format help topic files of your HelpSet. To show you how to create HelpSet data and navigation files, this chapter discusses the following topics:

• Understanding XML

• Creating the HelpSet file

• Assigning map IDs to help topics

• Specifying the navigation components

Understanding XML

The JavaHelp map, TOC, index, and HelpSet files are all written in the Extensible Markup Language (XML). Like HTML, XML is a web standard, but it’s more flexible. You can use XML to format any kind of textual data, not just web pages. In addition, you can use XML to describe the structure of textual data, which is how XML is used in HelpSet data and navigation files.

The map, TOC, index, and HelpSet files for the Aviation sample project contain markup tags you don’t find in HTML files. For example, look at the following line from the TOC file:

<tocitem target="intro" text="Introduction to Aviation">

The <tocitem> tag is not a standard HTML tag. A standard web browser simply skips over this tag, but JavaHelp’s HelpSet Viewer does know how to interpret it.

Each XML file contains a tree-structured hierarchy of elements. That is, an element can contain other elements. In particular, the root element of the tree contains all the other elements in the file. Elements that contain other elements have this form:

<tag  name1="value1"  name2="value2">
    text and other elements go here
</tag>

This kind of element has a