This applet represents the built-in help system
of w3browse. It may be invoked by the
"Help Menu" or by using the
context-sensitive keyboard shortcut Alt-H. Another way to browse
through the help system is to make use of
internal URLs that start with the
prefix internal://help/.
The files constituting the help system are just served by an internal server component, much like the way a regular web-server would also do. A difference lies in the fact that an additional invisible helper applet provides the capability to jump to the right help page in cases when a context-sensitive entry point is requested.
Furthermore, it is possible to search within the help
system. On the search page, an
input field for specifying a query and a
submit button are provided. The search
results are presented on a separate page, which also allows to refine the
query. The boolean operators AND, OR and
NOT together with parentheses () can be used to
specify a search. Right truncation of words with * is also
supported. Note that the search dictionary
is built at runtime in memory, so it may take a short time before the result
of the first query after opening a help window appears.
Another special feature of the help system is the ability to manage a
bookmarks page. This HTML page contains
initially a
collection of some common links to internal and external resources and can
always be accessed by using the internal URL
internal://help/bookmarks.html.
A special instance of the web page editor
makes it possible to edit the bookmarks. The modified version of the page is
stored in the file w3bookmarks.html, which is located in the
home directory of the current
user.
If the help system is invoked by using a menu or a keyboard shortcut, then it operates within a closed environment that uses a separate request context, so that accesses to external resources are not possible and may be honored with an error message. Otherwise, only those restrictions that may be imposed by the request context that is used to access the help pages are in effect.