yahuxo’s blog

After more than ten years I finally managed to update my personal homepage. I have searched a bit for some static website generator tool and finally selected Mallard together with mallard-site-tool. Installation was quite easy as most things (yelp-tools, yelp-xsl, itstool) were packaged for my distribution (Ubuntu), only mallard-site-tool needs to be installed from sources.

It took me some time to realize the difference between “Mallard” as a generic specification and the behavior of the actual implementation in Yelp tools. With the help of Shaun McCance I managed to get HTML pass-through working in mallard-site-tool by implementing Mallard’s support for external namespaces. This allows one to embed HTML elements within Mallard pages like in the following small example:

<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
   xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   type="topic" id="external">
<title>External Namespaces</title>
<p>
   <html:input type="button" value="Hello" onclick="alert('Hello World!');"/>
</p>
</page>

For future reference the solution is to use some custom XSL during site generation by including it in “index.site”:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<site xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/site/1.0/">
   <link type="site-root" href="."/>
   <link type="site-custom-xsl" href="custom.xsl"/>
</site>

The stylesheet file “custom.xsl” then contains the following template to pass-through HTML elements together with their attributes:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
   xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   version="1.0">

<!-- pass-through of inline HTML -->
<xsl:template mode="mal2html.inline.mode" match="html:*">
  <xsl:element name="{local-name(.)}" namespace="{$html.namespace}">
      <xsl:for-each select="./@*">
         <xsl:attribute name="{name()}">
            <xsl:value-of select="."/>
         </xsl:attribute>
      </xsl:for-each>
    <xsl:apply-templates mode="mal2html.inline.mode"/>
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The site looks quite nice now and editing Mallard pages is fun. So hopefully the next update will take less than ten years.