Pop-Up Blocked Message Appears

Peter,

Assuming you meant 'the only way," other than by IE 6 Security and Advanced options, I'm adding this.

Danni, what are the "basics"?

Please consult IE help for explanations of the Security and Advanced tabs under Tools > Internet Options, and "Block pop-ups" under Privacy.

Even with strict policies on Internet browsing, the "Trusted Sites" function might help you.

Harvey

I said "a blocker SUCH AS Google". I don't know what you may or may not have loaded.

Are you still having this problem?

If so, send me a screenshot via my website.

Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean that Google may be blocking the pop ups? I don't believe that Google is part of the download package at my company. They download IE, but that's about it. They don't want their employees on the internet, so they give them the basics.

With webhelp on a server, the only way the popups are going to get blocked is via a blocker such as Google or whatever is built into whatever browser, to the best of my knowledge. Anyone know different?

I'm sorry it took so long to reply back - I was waiting to hear back from the programmer. The WebHelp files live on the server - they are not downloaded onto the user's machine. Thank you for your help! I appreciate your time on this.

Danni

Danni,

In some ways, it makes sense to auto-download a .chm to the user's PC. As Peter points out, HTML help works better on a local PC. When you updated the .chm on the network, did the new one get downloaded to overwrite the old one? That would be a nifty way around the main drawback: Help files on the user's PC can become obsolete pretty fast.

If your developer is downloading WebHelp files to the user's PC just because that's how they did it before, he should know he is making several mistakes:

1. If you don't download the entire WebHelp package every time, the user's files soon become stale.
2. Then there's the volume of traffic across the network. Probably the management would not like to put such stress on bandwidth resources.
3. WebHelp files, as you have found, work on the local PC, but with some annoying glitches.
4. (This is related to No. 2) With WebHelp on the network, the user takes up minimal resources to download a topic, even a big one, with graphics. The developer is passing up a really significant opportunity for actually lowering traffic volume on a day-to-day basis. You should feel fairly strong in having this point on your side.

Maybe there's some overriding requirement to forbid user access to help files on the server. I'd like to hear it. They're already using a more powerful application there, right?

An early client of ours worried that if a user can roam around the help topics unfettered, she might be able to access parts of the application where she should not go. The client thought we should limit access to topics according to the application's privileges structure. Of course, we know you can't build -- or it would be extremely difficult to program, and probably would bump into the application's security -- a back door into the app from a help topic.

Harvey

I thought that currently the developers may be pointing to a CHM and you were generating WebHelp.

If it is webhelp and that is what the developer is linking to, then he/she does not need to change anything. However, you have the issues I mentioned.

It is normal nowadays for CHMs to be on a local drive and WebHelp to be on a server but subject to issues surrounding both, you can do that the opposite way, that is WebHelp locally and a CHM on a network. The latter is not recommended for reasons covered on my site.

Hope that clarifies things.

Ugh - now I'm getting nervous. I remember now that's why I disabled the Mark of the Web feature because of the troubles I was having with my pdf files. Question: since it's WebHelp, I thought there was no chm involved. Why would the programmer be linking to a chm in WebHelp? I've got to talk to the programmer now about this issue.

Is there another fix to the pop up issue besides mark of the web?

ooooh - where can I buy that there life assurance?!?!?! How many years will it get me?

:-P

It needs Mark of the Web, as you have found, and that does not play nicely with links to PDF files. Also the download will be many files so you have to consider how they get downloaded and placed in the right place retaining the structure.

Plus if your developers have created links to a CHM, they won't work any longer. Make sure your life assurance is paid up.