Accessed from the Mallard homepage, the Browser displays a list of all course material. At the top of the page there is a pulldown list from which you can select any material to view, try, or edit. Alternatively, you may choose any material from the displayed list: simply click on "View it!", Try it!", or "Edit it!".

View it!

This allows you to quickly view the source for any course material that has been uploaded to Mallard. To make reading the questions easier, Mallard displays any embedded question source with context-sensitive highlighting. Ordinary HTML text appears in black.

• <input>...</input>
• <answer>...</answer>
• <display>...</display>
• <eval>...</eval>
• <hint>...</hint>
• <link>...</link>
• <question>...</question>

Try it!

Clicking on the "Try it!" button lets you see how Mallard will display the course material, and you can also try it out.

Edit it!

This allows you to edit your course material files on the Mallard server. You can make any changes you wish in the editor window provided. Alternatively, you may prefer to edit your own copy of a file and then re-upload it from your own computer. (Recall that you can adjust the width and height of the edit window from the User Configuration page.)

Warning!

It can be dangerous to edit, in a browser input text window, files that contain special chracters - in particular, files with < (&lt;) and > (&gt;). The browser will convert "&lt;" back into "<" in your file. If you do use "<" or ">", you might use spaces around them to decrease the odds that they will appear like HTML tags to the browser. If you edit these files on your own machine and then reupload them to Mallard, you will avoid this problem.
Remember: In a nanosecond a browser can make changes throughout your file that could take you hours to undo!
Note: Clicking on the "Edit it!" button and thereby reading the file into the text window does not in itself cause changes to your file. The file is modified only upon clicking the "Save Changes" button.