Microsoft Assistance Markup Language (Microsoft AML, MAML) is an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

-based

markup language A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...

developed by the Microsoft User Assistance Platform team to provide user assistance ("

online help Online help is a form of user assistance that provides topic-oriented, procedural or reference information designed to assist in using a software application, web application or operating system. Online help linked to the application's state ( ...

") for the Microsoft

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

operating system. It makes up the Assistance Platform on Windows Vista. MAML is also used to provide help information for

PowerShell PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langu ...

V2 Cmdlets, modules and advanced functions.

Concept

MAML is a departure from all previous types of user assistance for Windows operating systems. Some of its features have been available in

.NET The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...

Framework 2, but more options shipped with the release of .NET Framework 3. Previously, user assistance for Windows operating systems used

Microsoft Compiled HTML Help Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) is a Microsoft proprietary online help format, consisting of a collection of HTML pages, an index and other navigation tools. The files are compressed and deployed in a binary format with the extension .CHM. Th ...

files, which contains little machine-readable semantic information. The most significant aspect of MAML is that it shifts the production of user assistance to the concept of structured authoring (somewhat similar to DITA or

DocBook DocBook is a Semantics (computer science), semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of docume ...

). Documents and their constituent elements are defined by their context. With MAML, the emphasis is on content and the tasks a user performs with a computer, not the features of the software. Presentation is managed as part of the rendering engine when a user requests a topic. The structured feature of MAML means that it can express a wide range of active concepts as well. One notable feature is guided help (active content wizard), which allows the help file to either run a task automatically or highlight the parts of the screen a user should interact with step-by-step. The feature was a notable aspect of Project Longhorn, yet Microsoft opted not to incorporate it into the ultimate release of Vista. The MAML authoring structure is divided into segments related to a type of content: conceptual, FAQ, glossary, procedure, reference, reusable content, task, troubleshooting, and tutorial.

Presentation

Three levels of transformation occur when a topic is displayed: structure, presentation, and rendering: * The structural transformation contains reusable content and applies conditional logic to determine the structure that content should take when it is displayed, and the content of the text itself. * The presentation transformation enables content authored in MAML to be used in many different formats, including

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XAML Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ) is a declarative XML-based language developed by Microsoft for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. XAML is used extensively i ...

, RTF, and printed material. * The rendering transformation applies style sheets and displays the final content to users.

Authoring

There are no tools to assist in creating MAML; therefore, the XML files must be created manually. An application such as

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, or Infopath may be used to manually create MAML content.

Format

MAML content uses the h1s help file format, which, along with the HelpPane viewer, is found in Windows Vista and Windows 7. The format is similar to Microsoft Help 2 .hxs files. A third party "xHelpMarkup" tool for compiling and decompiling exists, but it is only a wrapper around the BDD 2007 apcompnt and apss.dll tools.

References

External links