How do I use the online Help Feature?

If you've used any sort of basic online help system, you're already familiar with the primary concept behind the World Wide Web: hypertext. The idea behind hypertext is that instead of reading text in a rigid, linear structure (such as a book), you can easily skip from one point to another, get more information, go back, jump to other topics, and navigate through the text based on what interests you at the time.

Online help systems or help stacks such as those provided by Microsoft Windows Help, Sun Microsystems' AnswerBook, or HyperCard on the Macintosh use hypertext to present information. To get more information on a topic, just click on that topic. A new screen (or another window, or a dialog box, however the program defines a jump) appears with that new information. Perhaps there are links on that screen that take you to still other screens, and links on those screens that take you even further away from your original topic. The diagram below shows a simple diagram of how that kind of system works.

Now imagine that your online help system is linked to another online help system on another application related to yours; for example, your drawing program's help is linked to your word processor's help. Your word processor's help is then linked to an encyclopedia, where you could look up any other concepts that you don't understand. The encyclopedia is hooked into a global index of magazine articles that enables you to get the most recent information on the topics that the encyclopedia covers; the article index is then also linked into information about the writers of those articles, and some pictures of their children. These interconnected links might look something like:

With all these interlinked systems available in addition to the simple help system you got with the program you bought, you'd rapidly run out of disk space. You'd question whether you needed all this information when all you wanted to know was how to do one simple thing in your simple application. All that information could be expensive, too.

But if the information didn't take up much disk space, and if it were freely available and you could get it reasonably quickly and anytime you wanted to, then things would be more interesting. In fact, the information system might very well end up more interesting than the software you bought in the first place.

That's just what the World Wide Web is: more information than you could ever digest in a lifetime, linked together in various ways, out there on the Net, available for you to browse whenever you want to. It's big, and deep, and easy to get lost in.

 

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