Microsoft assistance markup language

The term "conceptual content" is actually a catch-all term used to refer to the various types of content that may appear in the help file. MAML actually defines several different content types, each used for a specific type of document conceptual, glossary, how-to, reference, etc. Each type has a specific structure with various required and optional XML elements. This help file will let you get to know the various document and element types.

Creating the actual topic files is just a matter of entering the content using a text editor. Creating a help file from them requires several configuration files and the Sandcastle tools. If you are going to build a help file using Sandcastle alone, see the topics in the Conceptual Content File Types section. They cover the various file types that are used in the build process. If you prefer a more visual and automated approach to managing and building help files, it is strongly recommended that you use one of the third-party tools such as the Sandcastle Help File Builder.

They contain all of the necessary features and tools required to make building help files with Sandcastle a much simpler process. This help file was produced using the Sandcastle Help File Builder and is an example of what the VS presentation style looks like. License Agreement. Sandcastle is a documentation generator from Microsoft. It automatically produces MSDN-style code documentation out of reflection information of. It can also be used to produce user documentation from Microsoft Assistance Markup Language MAML with the same look and feel as reference documentation.

Windows Vista has many significant new features compared with previous Microsoft Windows versions, covering most aspects of the operating system. Windows Vista contains a range of new technologies and features that are intended to help network administrators and power users better manage their systems. Notable changes include a complete replacement of both the Windows Setup and the Windows startup processes, completely rewritten deployment mechanisms, new diagnostic and health monitoring tools such as random access memory diagnostic program, support for per-application Remote Desktop sessions, a completely new Task Scheduler, and a range of new Group Policy settings covering many of the features new to Windows Vista.

Microsoft Help 2. The Office Open XML file formats are a set of file formats that can be used to represent electronic office documents. There are formats for word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as specific formats for material such as mathematical formulae, graphics, bibliographies etc.

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Archived from the original on Document markup languages. List of document markup languages. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses. Alerts are a Markdown extension to create block quotes that render on Docs with colors and icons that indicate the significance of the content.

Avoid notes, tips, and important boxes. Readers tend to skip over them. It's better to put that info directly into the article text. If you need to use alerts, limit them to one or two per article. Multiple notes should never be next to each other in an article. If you use angle brackets in text in your file for example, to denote a placeholder , you need to manually encode the angle brackets. If you copy from Word into a Markdown editor, the text might contain "smart" curly apostrophes or quotation marks.

These need to be encoded or changed to basic apostrophes or quotation marks. To avoid "smart" characters in your Markdown files, rely on the Docs Authoring Pack's smart quote replacement feature. For more information, see smart quote replacement. For guidance on when to use bold and italic text, see text formatting guidelines.

Docs Markdown supports the placement of code snippets both inline in a sentence and as a separate "fenced" block between sentences. For more information, see How to add code to docs. The columns Markdown extension gives Docs authors the ability to add column-based content layouts that are more flexible and powerful than basic Markdown tables, which are only suited for true tabular data. You can add up to four columns, and use the optional span attribute to merge two or more columns.

While the columns extension still works, we no longer recommend it for creating custom layouts. We've found that many custom column layouts have accessibility issues or otherwise violate Docs style guidelines. Don't create custom layouts. Use standard Docs features.

Columns should only contain basic Markdown, including images. Headings, tables, tabs, and other complex structures shouldn't be included. A row can't have any content outside of column.

For example, the following Markdown creates one column that spans two column widths, and one standard no span column:. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Donec vestibulum mollis nunc ornare commodo. Nullam ac metus imperdiet, rutrum justo vel, vulputate leo. Donec rutrum non eros eget consectetur. Do not put private or sensitive information in HTML comments. To support other image types, such as. Alternate text is required for screen readers for the visually impaired. It's also useful if there's a site bug where the image can't render.

However, don't copy file names for use as alt text. For example, instead of this:. The Docs custom image extension supports standard images, complex images, and icons. For standard images, the older Markdown syntax will still work, but the new extension is recommended because it supports more powerful functionality, such as specifying a localization scope that's different from the parent topic.

Other advanced functionality, such as selecting from the shared image gallery instead of specifying a local image, will be available in the future. The new syntax is as follows:. You can also use this extension to add an image with a long description that is read by screen readers but not rendered visually on the published page. Long descriptions are an accessibility requirement for complex images, such as graphs.

The syntax is the following:. When your changes are in preview or published, you can check whether the long description exists by right-clicking on the image and selecting Inspect when using Microsoft Edge browser, although other browsers have similar features.

This action brings you to the image source in the HTML code, underneath which you'll find a visually-hidden class. Expand the dropdown on this class, and you'll find your long description:.

The image extension also supports the border property, which automatically adds a 1-pixel gray border around your image. The border property is true by default for content and complex images, so you'll get the border automatically unless you explicitly add the property with a value of false.