Introduction to Mallard

Basic concepts

A Mallard help document is composed of several independent pages. Each page is kept in a separate XML file with the file extension .page, or .page.stub for draft files which are not ready to be included in the released documentation.

These pages can be one of two possible types: a guide page or a topic page. The type of page is specified using the type attribute, either type="guide" or type="topic"Every Mallard document requires a front page to serve as an overarching index: this front index page must be a guide page whose filename is index.page.

All pages require a unique ID. For ease of use, the ID should match the page name. For example, planting.page would have the id="planting" attribute on the page. The IDs are used primarily for linking one page to another. You can link two pages to each other or include links to topic pages from a guide page, but you should usually link from inside a topic page.

By default, Mallard will order all topic pages alphabetically on the index page. Guide pages can be nested within other guide pages to create organization on the index page.