<p dir="ltr">Hi Pedro, *,</p>
<p dir="ltr">Am 11.01.2014 12:50 schrieb "Pedro" <<a href="mailto:pedlino@gmail.com">pedlino@gmail.com</a>>:<br>
><br>
> [abbreviations or the term Online Help]</p>
<p dir="ltr">To make a long story short: this term comes from a time when you would buy software in a box and get a thick printed manual along with the installation medium.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Long version follows…</p>
<p dir="ltr">Online help is the stuff you had installed to your computer and the stuff on paper was the offline variant.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Back in the days there was no internet, let alone flatrates. And in the early days of internet, people gathered in newsgroups that were easy to handle offline, sync within a few seconds of expensive connection time.</p>
<p dir="ltr">It also happens that a lot of the people who were gathering in those groups also joined the OpenOffice.org project once it was announced, and later then moved to LibreOffice. They took their vocabulary with them, and by just talking with each other on the lists, new members got to know the terminology.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Now a lot of people without any previous experience join, and now we also have a web-based help, so I agree that the clear-back-then term became ambiguous, even misleading.</p>
<p dir="ltr">At least I refer to the web help as "wiki help", but that it uses a wiki is irrelevant and also might change in future. Just calling the web based one Online help doesn't cut it either as it has been used with a different meaning for was more than a decade.</p>
<p dir="ltr">So let's hear some suggestions. I assume everyone will understand which one is meant when they read the term "Offline Help" in isolation. If you disagree, please also suggest a different term for that.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Ciao<br>
Christian</p>