We’ve just released Mallard 1.1. Let’s take a look at what’s new. All of these features are already supported in tools like Yelp and Pintail.
This is part 2 in a 3-part series. Read part 1.
Table header cells
Mallard mostly follows the HTML table model, with some simplifications of how things are styled. One element that was notably absent from Mallard tables, however, was the th element. The th element allows you to mark a cell as being a header for a row or column, even if it’s not in a thead element (as row headers wouldn’t be).
This was a pretty obvious and easy addition. I was so confident Mallard 1.1 would get a th element that I added a Ducktype shorthand for it well before Mallard 1.1 was released.
Custom roles for links
MEP-0003: The role Attribute on the links Element
This one’s pretty exciting, though a bit advanced. In Mallard, links can have roles which affect things like link text. These work with the multiple informational titles you can provide for a page or section. So, for example, if your language needs to do declensions for different parts of speech, you could write your links like this:
<link role="subject" xref="useful"/> is really useful. For useful info, check out <link role="object" xref="useful"/>.
Then in useful.page, you would have something like this:
<info> <title type="link" role="subject">Subject Title</title> <title type="link" role="object">Object Title</title> </info> <title>Normal Title</title>
Mallard will pick up the right title. More often, however, you don’t write your links inline, but instead you do automatic linking with informational links and possibly the links element. What happens then?
In Mallard 1.0, different types of automatic links have implicit roles. So the topic links on a guide page will automatically use the "topic" role to select link text from titles, for example. There are implicit roles for topic, guide, seealso, and series links.
So far, so good. But what if you want to use different titles for link text when coming from different guide pages with different topic link styles? This is where the new Mallard 1.1 feature comes in. In Mallard 1.1, you can add a role attribute to a links element to set the primary role to use for all the links it generates. The implicit role for that links type will still be used as a secondary role.
<links type="topic" role="fancyrole"/>
Boring schema changes
In Mallard 1.0, sections were required to have id. There were a couple of reasons I made that decision, but in the end it turned out to annoy more people than it helped. So in Mallard 1.1, section IDs are optional.
We also made a perfectly boring schema change to make it easier for the Cache Files schema to extend the Mallard schema. (There’s also a new Cache Files 1.1 release.) Although RELAX NG is a mostly great schema language for extensible schema design, it does take some effort to design schemas that can be extended. Mallard got a lot of things right, but sometimes we find something to improve.
And more
That’s it for part 2. If you haven’t already, go read part 1, and keep your eye out for part 3. For more information, you can read the Mallard 1.1 changes, the Mallard 1.1 enhancement proposals, and the 1.1 milestone issues.
Want to get involved? Take a look at our 1.2 milestone issues. Or check out the Documentation issue label and help us write tutorials. Keep in touch on the Mallard mailing list.
