Create HTML Topic Files

Microsoft Corporation

Updated June 10, 1999

Whether you are creating help topics for distribution with a program, or on the Web, the documents you author are created using a special formatting language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML topic files have a .htm or .html file name extension.

Although each help topic or Web page you author appears to be a document with text, graphics, or animated images on it, .htm files are actually text documents that have special HTML formatting codes. These codes, called tags, tell a browser how to display each page. Only the text that appears in a topic or Web page is actually in the .htm file. Any graphics, sounds, animated images, or other elements that appear are separate files that your HTML file points to. The browser copies or downloads the graphics, sounds, or other elements when it sees the tags telling it to do so.

Your first task as a help or Web site author is to create a design for your topics, and then you can create HTML files. If you are converting files from a previous version of Help, such as WinHelp, you can create an HTML Help topic from a WinHelp topic.

After you have created the files that contain your content, you can:

Create links or jumps within a file, from one HTML file to another, or to a Web site or other location.
Create a help project file to manage your collection of topics and related files.
Create a table of contents file.
Create an index file.
Assign information types to your topics to determine which group of users will see each topic.
Compile your help project into a single help file.