Gabe and I have talked about the alternatatives for help with VegBank.
option 1) a servlet that would interpret a URL build an "on-demand" html file,
read from a datasource, either an xml file or database. To update or add help,
anyone could update the xml file/database. This requires modification of a
current servlet or a new one. The requires time.
option 2) one could accomplish roughly the same thing using ANT to distribute
the datasource (perhaps a properties file that allows filtering tokens of
queryhelp to the query help html page). This could keep all help in one file
for the sake of management's sake, but the user would only have to look at the
help they requested.
option 3) leave as is, which is a big html file with anchors. This accomplishes
the same thing as the other options, but is much less time intensive for us.
This is also quite common on the web, for example, faq's. I will add a menu to
the html file so that it is a bit cleaner and perhaps more organized. At the
end of the process, the user still sees the help that was requested. -- and this
is a much more efficient use of our time.
----SO WE ARE GOING WITH OPTION 3 FOR NOW-----