XHTML targets — Good for what, exactly?

[Phlawm53]

In Flare 6, is anyone delivering the XHTML target in production, and is yes, how?

It seems to me, based on cursory exploration, that the XHTML target is a figurative orphan, with scant online help information and no apparent fan base on this forum(?)

Moreover, the Flare online help topic About XHTML Output includes the following footnote: "Note: The MadCap Book Viewer is simply used for viewing the output after generating it from Flare. The Book Viewer is not redistributable. However, end users can still view XHTML output from a browser window."

However, if I view the XHTML target in Firefox, Opera, or IE8 browsers, pages and tables are not correctly formatted: Table borders disappear, etc. So viewing XHTML targets in browsers seems to require, at best, some additional CSS work or some such(?)

So at least at first glance, it doesn't seem that the XHTML target is intended for prime time?

Cheers & thanks,
Riley

[RamonS]

My understanding is that it isn't a help system per se, but a means to get content out of Flare with all the things built in that get added during build (snippets, proxies, variables). These files can the be used to do all kinds of things with them, including properly formatting or converting it into some other format. If you want a full (X)HTML based help then use WebHelp.

[NorthEast]

Actually, to be fair, the Flare help topic does actually describe what it's supposed to be used for - as an "intermediary" format that you can transform/convert to another system/format. It's a way to 'export' your Flare project (with source tags intact, rather than compiled XHTML), so that you can re-use it in another system.

It's not an format that you deliver to the end-user as-is.