MAML links
February 9th, 2004 2 Comments
Update: 15/11/2008
The link in this post is broken. See my comment below for an alternative link on the Internet Archive.
Here's a useful page full of links to information about MAML (Microsoft Assistance Markup Language):
http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/port_tech_helplh.aspx
MAML is Microsoft's XML dialect for producing .HELP files for the next version of Windows (currently named "Longhorn" and recently shunted backwards for release some time in 2007). MAML is a hugely sensible move on Microsoft's part. Anyone who is familiar with using an XML dialect for documentation – for example, DocBook – will find MAML very easy to get to grips with.
Microsoft could have adopted DocBook, but when you're Microsoft you don't adapt existing technologies that don't quite fit what you want to achieve. It was cleaner and probably easier to start from scratch and devise a new, purpose-built XML variety for "assistance" documentation (in most cases that means online help).
If you write online help you'll be hearing a lot more about MAML in the coming months.
Potentially similar posts
- Fix “No topics found” issue in CHM output – November 2010
- Help is just a search and a click away – August 2010
- The four levels of software support – June 2010
- Does online help need an overall structure? – June 2010
- Tech writing blogs – March 2009
November 14th, 2008 at 4:21 pm (#)
Hey, that link above is obsolete (as of Nov 14), this page gets reasonably high Google placement on MAML HELP, can someone update the link? I'd offer the new URL to that resource if I could...
November 15th, 2008 at 10:46 pm (#)
Yes, you're right. It looks like Microsoft killed off MAML sometime after I posted this, before Vista finally got released. MSDN no longer tells you anything about MAML, it's almost like it never existed, although I remember at the time it looked like quite a lot of work had been done on it.
The information is still available at the Internet Archive, although it looks like the pages were removed from MSDN sometime in 2004:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040216045344/http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/port_tech_helplh.aspx