Mallard can do that?!

Phil mentioned the future of Desktop Help, but he was sparse on details. Let me fill in the blanks. With Mallard, we worry mostly about structure and content, and we leave the rendering details to Yelp. Sometimes we want to influence the style, and for that we use Mallard’s style hints. But sometimes, just sometimes, for very special pages, we want to inject some pizzazz.

We can do that too. Watch:

This is using some custom style hints and a very small Mallard extension, which falls back gracefully thanks to Mallard’s well-defined rules for extensions and fallback.

This is still a work in progress. And with work continuing into the night at the help hackfest in Toronto, it’s very much in progress.

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States
This work by Shaun McCance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States.