Implementing help in web application

Avoiding help being blocked - design professional help

[Philiboy]

Hi,

I am looking for some help in designing some professional help. First of all, will popup help along the lines of <a href="javascript:helpwindow('help.html',120)"> to reference the help and window.open(popup,"name",... in the helpwindow function, be blocked by popup blockers? I notice that several major browser based webmasters tools use this style of online help.

Or should I be using something like macromedia's robohelp? The trouble is, I would like some of the help to be of pop-up style, providing explanations of some of my application's features. Also I want to be able to pass some parameters into the help to dynamically control the help information that is displayed. I am not sure you can do all that with robohelp.

In summary, can anyone recommend a way of providing good quality help which can be dynamically controlled and which will not get blocked?

Thanks

[orion_rus]

if somebody disables javascript, you can't make any popups(
I think the best way for this is to use iframes - then somebody points out to your object you call a container in a hidden iframe in it, which loads your help, then it loads with onload event you copy iframe to this container - and you see a plain text, like you already have it
I hope i was clear
Good luck to you

[RonPK]

The average popup blocker will only block unrequested popups, for example those that are triggered by an onload event. Popups initiated by an onclick event should thus not be blocked.

And if you make your links like this:

<a href="help.html" onclick="helpwindow(this.href); return false" target="somenewwindow"> help </a>

, even the javascript-challenged among your users will be served.