What’s New in Mallard 1.1, Part 3

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 3 in a 3-part series. Read part 1 and part 2.

Keywords

MEP-0014: Informational keywords element

One of the most visible additions in Mallard 1.1 is the introduction of the keywords element. If you look through a lot of real-world documents, you’ll find some that stuff synonyms into the desc element just to match things that users search for. This is not ideal.

In Mallard 1.1, we’ve introduced the keywords element to aid search systems built into tools like Yelp and Pintail. We decided to keep the element simple, using just a comma-separated list of terms instead of any nested keyword elements.

External info links

MEP-0007: External Info Links

Mallard features a number of types of automatic links, like seealso links. These links tend to automatically link in both directions, hence why we call them automatic links. The exact way they automatically link back depends on the link type. They all use informational link elements with an xref attribute, and the link text for these links is taken from informational elements like title and desc of the target node.

Since automatic links use the xref attribute, they were only able to link to pages within the same document, not to anything on the web. This makes some sense. After all, we can’t very well make random web pages automatically link back to our page. But sometimes you really do just want to have a seealso link to an external web page, even if it can’t automatically link back.

In Mallard 1.1, you can use the href attribute on informational links. Exactly how this works depends on the link type, but in general for things like seealso links, the link will appear in the list with your internal links. Because we can’t reliably fetch external resources for the link text every time we build a document, the informational link element can now have a title and desc element to specify the title and desc of the target.

Inline highlights

MEP-0009: Inline Highlight Element

Another highly visible change is the new hi element. This element can be used to highlight text that you’ve added or changed when progressively building up code examples. You can see it in action in the Mallard Ten Minute Tour.

In fact, we’ve been using this element (in the experimental namespace) in the Ten Minute Tour and other places since before Mallard 1.0 was even released. It was (I think) the first thing we added to the experimental namespace, and certainly the longest element in continual use without being in an actual spec. I wasn’t sure back then if we really wanted to add it, because it was unlike any inline element in any other semantic format. Years and years of usage have proven it’s worth having.

You can also use the ins and del style hints when including a diff in a Mallard page. These will do what you expect: green background, and red background with a strikethrough, respectively. Also, the yelp-xsl stylesheets let you use any of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple as style hints to set the background color. Have fun.

Linkable sequences

Mallard features ubiquitous linking, meaning that any of the three linking attribute can be used on any inline element, so you don’t have to use two separate element to make a function name be both code and a link. Well, almost any inline element. In Mallard 1.0, you couldn’t put linking attributes on the guiseq and keyseq elements. I have completely forgotten whatever reason I might have had for doing that, and multiple people have since convinced me that was a mistake. Mallard 1.1 fixes this. You can now do ubiquitous linking on guiseq and keyseq.

Speaking of guiseq and keyseq, we’re considering creating a shorthand syntax for them so you can easily write simple GUI paths and key sequences without nested gui and key elements. Comment on the issue to let us know your thoughts.

And more

That’s it for part 3 of 3. If you haven’t already, read part 1 and part 2. 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.

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