The next milestone of Eclipse 3.3 will have one of the coolest features ever (in regards to UA)… Help Content Providers allow Eclipse to read help content in any format. This was one of the dreams I had for Eclipse when Lawrence Mandel and I were writing the Authoring with Eclipse article.
The problem here was that a lot of products ship documentation that’s based on either DocBook or DITA (two popular documentation formats). To get these formats to work with the Eclipse help system, transforms were written to generate Eclipse help system compatible artifacts (ie., toc.xml). Hopefully with the new Help Content Providers yet to be written, this no longer will have to be necessary. This will also allow people to use standard documentation formats instead of kludging a bunch of HTML files together. Furthermore, this should spur more adoption of DITA and DocBook.
Thank you UA team.