Contributing XHTML help documents

Why use XHTML?

The help system provides the ability to produce dynamic help content by annotating your XHTML markup with special tags to filter, include, and extend documents. These features are not available when using HTML.

How to contribute XHTML

XHTML help documents are contributed in exactly the same way as HTML documents by referencing them from a table of contents (TOC) file. Since Eclipse 3.4 it is no longer necessary to bind the "org.eclipse.help.base.xhtml" search participant to your doc plugin.

XHTML include format

If you wish to use includes in your XHTML, the format of the path attribute is as follow: (explained below)

   <plugin_id>/<path_to_xhtml_file>/<filename_xhtml>/<element_id>

Where the fields are:

• plugin_id: The id of the plug-in containing the content to include (e.g. org.eclipse.help)
• path_to_xhtml_file: The plug-in relative path to the file (e.g. /my_folder/my_sub_folder/)
• filename_xhtml: The name of the XHTML file, including extension (e.g. my_file.xhtml)
• element_id: The unique identifier for the element you wish to include. This is set by adding an id attribute to that element (e.g. my.element.id)

For example, if you wish to include the paragraph (<p> element) with the id my_copyright from the file /copyrights/copyright.xhtml in plugin my.product.plugin, you would specify the following:

   my.product.plugin/copyrights/copyright.xhtml/my_copyright