The Winhlp-L list has long been the bonding glue of the Help authoring community. George Byrnes, creator of Winhlp-L, provides a brief history of the list.

Winhlp-L was created through a glorious accident. In the early 1990's, I was working on a Toolbook-based tutorial for my college's Humanities course. The owner of Toolb-L responded to a query I sent to that list about the best way to create a hypertext glossary support file with the news that the Windows Help Authoring Template (What.zip) and Help Authoring Guide (Whag.zig) had been released by Microsoft and were freely available at various FTP sites. The WinHelp format proved to be exactly what I needed. Although the 3.1 format had many graphical and textual limitations, it nevertheless allowed me to pack more than 2 MB of information on a single floppy disk and did not require the distribution of the bulky runtime files like Toolbook required to function.

In the end, the Toolbook application was never fully implemented (though I did win an Innovator of Year award for the project). However, my Winhelp-based "Humanities StudyDesk" is now published by Prentice Hall with our textbook, and I have linked a web site to the disk to provide a dynamic extension to this static resource: http://www.humberc.on.ca/~byrnes/huma.html. I refer to this as constructing a learning matrix of print resources, electronic study materials, and Internet resources, all designed to amplify the interaction that takes place in the classroom between students and the professor.

When I began working with the Help Authoring Guide I quickly realized I had more questions than the writers of this guide had imagined. I had and still have an aversion to newsgroups, and a search of listservs did not reveal a list dedicated to Winhelp authors. My college happened to serve as a local hub for listservs so it was no trouble establishing Winhlp-L. I set about advertising the list by contacting the owners of related lists. I remember checking the list each day to see the number of subscribers growing: 100, 500, 1000. What had begun as a means to get answers to my questions suddenly became a way for me to make a contribution to e-life, a way to link with others across the Internet.

Though it aided many technical writers over the years, and for this I am very pleased, Winhlp-L had a very simple, non-technical genesis: it was created by an English professor seeking an economical way to provide structured information to his students. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Unfortunately, Winhlp-L had run out of time on the Humber College network. The list had to move to another provider. After a series of heated discussions, Winhlp-L made its transition to HATT. Bill Swallow, creator of HATT, provides a brief history of HATT and the transition:

I created the Help Authoring Tools & Technologies (HATT) eGroup on July 22, 2000 as an on-topic online community for Help authors. At that time the Winhlp-L mailing list was under a rather persistent spam attack, which generated a great amount of noise on the list about the source of the spam and what to do about it. A small handful of Winhlp-L members joined HATT at that time, however the list remained silent. I let HATT run for several weeks, and then polled the existing members to determine what to do. The consensus was to leave the list up and running, just to see if anything might happen.

About a week later, a very interesting message from George Byrnes was forwarded to Winhlp-L. The message contained the following text from Humber College:

"We regret to inform you that we can no longer host the Winhlp-L list at Humber College. The server that supports these lists does not have the capacity to continue hosting these lists in addition to supporting our Student Registration systems. We are approaching a very busy time and our priorities are to support the registration system needs first. We would be willing to transfer the subscription list and the archives for this list to another host, if you can arrange for a new site. Alternatively, we will schedule the list availability so that it is processing mail in the off-shift hours of our operation (11:00 PM until 7:00 am daily). Queued mail would be processed in this window. Please let me know by August 11, 2000 if you have an alternate site, or I will proceed with the shortened hours of service."

This message sparked a heated debate about what to do with Winhlp-L. Several people offered to move the list to their servers. However, seeing as I already had a Help authoring list up and running, I offered HATT as the new home for Winhlp-L. Many list members migrated over to HATT and began persuading others on Winhlp-L to do the same.

The transition wasn't easy; because I originally created HATT as an on-topic-only list, many people were reluctant to make the move to HATT. I removed the on-topic-only rule from HATT and offered it up as the new home for Winhlp-L. Through the efforts of several list members, the remainder of the active Winhlp-L community began its migration to HATT, but not without testing the waters to make sure HATT was indeed a non-policed list.

Now that the dust has settled from the mass move-in, the Help authoring community has a happy, healthy home at HATT.

HATT (at the time of this writing) has over 580 members and has processed more than 1450 posted messages. The eGroup site provides the following tools that the HATT community regularly uses to share Help authoring information:

• A running archive
• A chat room
• File space
• Database area
• Polling features
• A group calendar.

If you are a Help author or plan on authoring Help in the future, be sure to take advantage of all this community has to offer. The name has changed, but the community is the same.

You can subscribe via the Web at http://www.egroups.com/group/HATT. When you have joined, you can log into the site to modify your subscription settings or access some of the other features the community has to offer.

If you cannot access the site or only want to interact with the community via e-mail, send an e-mail to hatt-subscribe@egroups.com. Then, you will receive additional subscription information via e-mail

To post a message to the list, send an e-mail to hatt@egroups.com.

If you have any problems with the HATT eGroup, contact the list moderators at hatt-owner@egroups.com. One of the HATT moderators will respond to your request.

Bill Swallow (list owner)
David Knopf
Don Lammers
Paul O’Rear

George Byrnes is English professor at Humber College, Toronto,where he teaches writing and Humanities courses. For the last ten years, he has also taught writing courses for lawyers and judges through the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice. Currently, he is involved as project liaison for various college change initiatives and continues to explore ways to employ information technology, especially hypertext formats, to effect collaboration and knowledge development.

Bill Swallow is a technical writer for PowerAdz.com. He is also the owner of many mailing lists, including HATT and WWP-Users, and acting editor for InFrame.