1.0 Features

Hi folks,

I'd like to finally declare Mallard 1.0 stable this summer,
so I'm looking over what outstanding features might be worth
including. Here's my proposed list:

* The links element - Discussed on this list last August.
This gives you a way to control how and where automatic
links are displayed, such as links on guide pages. This
is the biggest of the proposed features. I'll write up a
proposed spec and ask for more review.

* A mark element - Yelp has supported the e:hi element in
the experimental namespace for a very long time, basically
since the very beginning of Mallard support. It highlights
a run of text. I added it so I could highlight what was
added in successive examples in the Mallard spec.

It turns out that e:hi was also useful when doing developer
tutorials for Gnome. So that makes me think it's probably
generally useful for a lot of similar cases. Since HTML has
a similar element called mark, I propose we just use that
as the element name instead.

* A version attribute - We should have a way to specify what
Mallard version a page is written for. The obvious way to do
that is with a version attribute on the page element.

I actually have a pretty decent idea of how the version could
be used to specify what extensions are used, and how a tool
could dynamically construct an RNG schema to validate based
on that. It's a tad tricky because of restrictions on name
classes in RNG, but doable.

* Extra link title roles - There's a role attribute for link
titles that allows you to specify different titles for links
in different contexts. The defined roles are guide, seealso,
topic, and trail. Extra roles should be added to match the
things you can do with the links element.


Looking at the list archives, I see discussions on conditional
processing, push content, an action attribute, and faceted
navigation.

I think conditional processing and faceted navigation are good
ideas, but should be extensions. Basic facets actually work
right now in Yelp, but I'd like to hammer on them more before
trying to finalize a spec.

Push content is a neat idea, but I'm not sure I could get the
performance good enough for delivery. It might be useful as
part of a build process. Either way, it's definitely extension
material.

As for the action attribute, I'm not convinced it's the right
way to go. We could probably figure out something more general
to support more interactive pages. But without more use cases,
I can't come up with a good proposal.

I'd love to get some comments on all of these.

--
Shaun