Alex: The Power of HTML — Hey, That’s My Language!

Written by Alex:

You see HTML referenced everywhere; it’s practically on every single corner of anything Internet related. On websites, on posting services (like WordPress), even in a tonne of reference books.

What HTML/XHTML looks like. Image via Wikipedia.

HTML, in short, is the language of webpages. It is a standardised computing language that all web browsers understand, and is one of the backbones that allow webpages to be displayed similarly across different browsers and operating systems. (There’s also CSS, but that’s for another time.)

Tim Berners-Lee. Image via Wikipedia.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, was invented by the physicist Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web. Later on, when the internet became more accessible, it got messed up in the so-called browser wars. It became standardised by W3C and has evolved into its current state, HTML 5.

There’s also XHTML. XHTML stands for eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language, and it’s basically a cross between XML and HTML. For most users, it’s okay to regard XHTML as a more powerful, but more picky version of HTML.

Okay, so that’s a history lesson over, now what does this have to do with anything Adrian’s doing?

Help!

I’m not actually messing up, and nothing of any danger has happened to me. Yet.

I am writing a help system for my project, which means that it needs a text display.

Normally, using my limited set of technical knowledge, I would have gone for creating a lot of userforms and then sticking tons of text and images on it.

But I thought that would be boring and wouldn’t he interesting or helpful enough, and actually on inconvenience the booker.

Instead, I am opting for a more difficult, but more assistive system: I want to call in Apple’s own help system and write files that use it.

The Developer Library at Apple has proven very helpful for all things Apple programming. I have found resources to write Mac OS X applications, iOS applications, and now, help files for Mac OS X.

The allows for a much more integrated system and more functionality by bringing in some of the more advanced features of the Mac OS X help software — the ability to search through the files, the advanced, built-in formatting blocks that the help system has, the indexing abilities, and so forth.

In face, the Mac OS X help files are actually written in HTML and XHTML, two languages I am somewhat fluent in. The only problem will be implementing that into the system; but the writing of the help files will be really easy with my knowledge of HTML and XHTML.

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