Archive for February, 2007

One of my major goals for the Mozilla Developer Center going forward is to find ways to improve the process by which our documentation is translated into languages other than English. The key idea is to ensure that the largest number of programmers are covered by our documentation.

To accomplish this, we need to ensure that certain key languages have high-quality, well-maintained documentation that is kept current.

Our translators are doing a great job, but it’s time for us to find ways to bring a little order to the chaos and help ensure that all our translations (not to mention our English documentation) are kept in sync with each other.

I’ve jotted down some ideas and some notes and would like to get feedback from the other writers and translators. Let’s work together to find ways to make your work easier.

I’ll be attending the upcoming Developer Day that’s taking place in Boston on March 30th. As always, I’ll be hoping to talk to folks working on the project to get their insights and opinions as to what areas of our documentation most need improvement in order to help them get their work done better and faster.

One way that we’re going to try to optimize the documentation process is by establishing practices for contributing writers and translators to work better together to help ensure that our developer documentation is consistent (and consistently as accurate as possible) across all languages.

I’ll be blogging more about that soon once I finish going through all the ideas I’ve got jotted down. I’ll make some proposals, offer some ideas, and see what everyone thinks. Hopefully together we can hammer out some great ideas.

I’ve finished migrating the plugin scripting documentation into MDC. It’s had a few fixes applied during the migation, and should be in pretty good shape. Obviously I’d appreciate it if anyone would like to look it over and fix anything I missed (or even just let me know about any concerns).

One down, a few gajillion more documents to migrate!

I’ve started migrating the material contained in Johnny Stenback’s “Scripting Plugins in Mozilla” document from the old doc site to the MDC wiki. It’s not done yet, and I’ll be working on it for at least the rest of today and probably a bit tomorrow as well.

The most comlicated part to doing migrations like this is making sure you get the document properly converted to our new styles, formatting, and so forth. That includes both making sure that all references to code and variable names and the like are in code blocks, as well as to be sure that functions are documented on separate pages instead of all on one page, which was often the case in the old documentation.

Migrating docs is certainly not difficult, though. It just takes a little bit of attention to detail.

In related news, the request for an intern to help work on the migration work has started to percolate its way upward.

My personal goal for the migration work is to get all the developer documentation from http://www.mozilla.org migrated or deleted as appropriate based on whether or not that content is actually still viable, all by the end of 2007.

That will only happen with help, though, since a major focus of my attention for most of this year will of course be Firefox 3 documentation. There are also other pulls at my time, some of them I will be blogging about very soon, once I finish collecting my thoughts a bit more.