What does your HAT do behind your back?

by Dana Cline

A recent discussion on the Help Authoring Tools (HAT) list on Yahoo centered on the often poor or bloated HTML produced by some help authoring tools. Some thought their HAT produced clean compact code; others figured theirs produced bloated code. Several help authoring consultants decided to find out exactly what was happening.

We started with a published specification. The spec called for a single HTML topic,  specified the actual text for multiple paragraphs, and included information about the styles and layout. The topic was sufficiently complex in that it contained tables, several types of lists, a shortcut, a popup, and several complex styles. Each author then implemented the sample topic in his or her favorite tool, importing only the text from Notepad.

The results of this exercise are posted at consultant David Knopf's web site at http://www.knopf.com/resources/hatcomp. Tools we tested include AuthorIT, ForeHTML, WebWorks Publisher, Doc-To-Help, and several versions of RoboHelp. If your favorite HAT was not represented and you'd like to contribute that sample page to the project, there should be information on the web site about how to do so by the time you read this.

As expected, DreamWeaver produced the most compact HTML, at 7k for the sample page. The largest was RoboHelp HTML at 27k. The required CSS style sheet sizes were also all over the map, ranging from .5k for DreamWeaver to over 30k for AuthorIT. The resulting CHM file sizes were interesting – almost all HATs were within about 20k, though both versions of RoboHelp topped out at over 40k. Of all the tools, only DreamWeaver produced both HTML and CSS that passed the W3C validation engine.

All of the results are posted on David's web site, including links to download each tool's CHM file, view the raw HTML, and check the validation results.