CHM format alternatives?

Question

Microsoft CHM format is great as provide such facilities:

Table of contends with tree view.

Index.

Indexed search.

Based on HTML source.

But this format is outdated and have many drawbacks:

Have security issues (allow execute JavaScript code).

Don't know about new HTML formats.

Not documented.

Can not properly handle different character codings (like UTF-8).

Are there any alternatives for CHM which have reader and compiler for all desctop OSes?

PS. I hear that QT come this something like, KDE, NetBeans also use own help format. How about non-vendor specific?

PPS. Some related:

http://live.gnome.org/devhelp and
DevHelp is a GNOME based online help system aimed toward developers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML MHTML, short for MIME HTML

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket also e-book proprietary format

PPS. As state page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats most closed to CHM is EPUB and Mobipocket format. But this format internally use XHTML so existing html page may not properly rendered by EPUB/mobi readers. Also as new to this format I don't know if they have TOC, index and search as in CHM.

Answer 1

No there is nothing. Even on Windows, Vista+ has a new helpsystem but it is not used much and that will probably remain the same till XP is dead to the corporate world. Visual Studio helpsystems have been decoupled from the system helpsystem.

The opensource world has played a bit, but usually on the basis of loose html files, and never very extensible (e.g. that an user could install new apps and that its helpcontent would integrate with the existing helpsystem). IOW more html manuals than helpsystems.

The few attempts that have been made were connected to either GNome or KDE, and thus only worked for the apps that were delivered with those systems. (and not for e.g. third party GTK and QT apps). They were not very nice either (again often loose HTML, slow), and not very stable in time. Often they change every major version. It is one of the places that could do with a little bit of opendesktop standarization, but as always, that stumbles on at least one have to give up his current help system.

There are tons of CHM readers for the various (non-windows) platforms though, and recently also one portable compiler. The fact that both KDE and Gnome have both their own chm reader (resp. kchmviewer and gnochm) says enough.

Answer 2

Qt Assistant is the closest I know, it can be used to display custom help collections. However, it is not pre-installed on any of the OSes.