Popups and Secondary Windows

OmniHelp fully supports the use of secondary windows and full-HTML popups which can contain links of their own. For example, a popup may be handy for a Note:. A secondary window may be useful for a large graphic, such as the enlarged form of the OmniHelp Logo, or for a stepwise procedure.

The coding for such display is simple. The link (<a href=...>) contains a target attribute with the name of the desired window, and an OnClick attribute that calls a Javascript function: sec(this, 200, 100); return false where the 200 and 100 are optional, the desired width and height for the window. Another parameter may be added to specify JS opening properties, such as menubar,titlebar. Mif2Go automates this process, using FrameMaker character formats applied to the link hotspots to identify the target window, with window properties defined just once in mif2htm.ini.

Popup windows behave like other secondary windows, except that you get a fresh popup every time you target the popup window. With the other window types, if the targetted window already exists, the new content goes into the existing window replacing the old. Popups also have less “chrome” by default; their JS opening properties are minimalist: “dependent,scrollbars,resizable”. Secondary windows have that plus quite a bit more: “title,titlebar,status,menubar,toolbar”.

If you have a plain link in a popup or secondary window, the new content replaces the old in the same window. If you want to put the new content back into the topic window in the frameset, simply use target=”main” in the link; no OnClick is needed in that case.

Different browsers do handle these windows differently. With Netscape, the popups stay on top, and when the main frameset is closed, so are the popups and secondary windows. With IE, however, the windows do not stay on top, and they remain after the frameset is closed. Neither browser gives the WinHelp popup effect where clicking anywhere on the popup or main window closes the popup; you have to close the windows explicitly by clicking the top right X.