Archive for the 'Mozilla' Category

With the exception of a couple of questions about the non-standard referenceNode and pointerBeforeReferenceNode properties, I’ve completed the documentation for NodeIterator.

My questions revolve around not actually knowing what those two properties do, for certain, although I presume that referenceNode lets you peek at the node currently referenced without moving the iterator.

Next up, I plan to start working on the documentation for @font-face.

Over the weekend, I did some cleanup work on the documentation for media queries and various other topics; these should all be in pretty good shape now.

This morning, I wrote up the documentation for the MozAfterPaint event (courtesy of the blog post by roc that went up while I was asleep, which made the work much, much easier).

Remember: in open source, there’s no such thing as plagiarism.

Lots to do but the progress is great.

I mostly spent today twiddling documentation I wrote over the course of the week.  Little fixes as suggestions come in, a few organizational corrections, that kind of thing.  It was a great week of work, and I’m really pleased.

There are some moderately significant corrections remaining to be made in the media queries documentation; I plan to work on that tomorrow.

I’ve been getting fantastic feedback, which I really appreciate.  I’m sure there’ll be plenty more!

I’ve posted the article “Using geolocation“, which provides introductory information on using the new geolocation API being introduced in Firefox 3.1.  I’ll be adding a working example tomorrow (later today, actually, now that I look at my clock and see it’s already Friday).  I’ve also not yet documented the interfaces behind geolocation, but I’ll be doing those tomorrow.

As always, if you happen to notice any errors, please feel free to correct them or let me know what needs fixing so I can do it.

Enjoy!

Since video and audio have such similar syntax, once I got audio documented, the documentation for video came together really fast.  Enjoy!

I’ve just completed documentation for the HTML 5 audio element.  This is pretty nifty stuff; I’ll be working on the video element tonight and tomorrow morning.  I’m waiting for email back in response to a couple of questions (it’s possible I may have documented some attributes we don’t yet support), and I’m sure I’ll be updating the content in the next day or two.

Also, I wrote an example which doesn’t work yet — I think because the MDC server doesn’t currently serve up .ogg files with the correct MIME type; I’ve filed a ticket to address that.

One great thing that sometimes happens while writing documentation is that your simple samples you throw together uncover bugs that you get to report.  That’s sort of “bonus, value-added work” as far as I’m concerned.  In this case, I discovered that the fallback text always appears, even if the audio plays.

Anyway, if you happen to notice any problems with this documentation, feel free — as always — to correct it, or drop me a note if you’d rather I handle the correction.

I’ve just completed the documentation for CSS media queries.  This is a very, very nifty capability that lets you select different style sheets based on very precise criteria.  For example, you can use different style sheets on standard versus widescreen displays, or based on the dimensions of the browser window, or whether the screen is 24-bit color or monochrome.

This is very exciting stuff, and hopefully the documentation will be helpful!

The documentation for CSS transforms in Firefox 3.1 is now more or less complete.  Both the -moz-transform and -moz-transform-origin properties have been documented, and there’s also documentation for the CSS transform functions.

Let me know what you think, and feel free to edit and add more examples!

MindTouch has posted their initial plans for the upcoming “Lyons” release, which will be the next major update that we’ll receive from them, early next year.  This version promises to address the vast majority of the issues we still have with Deki, including most of those on my “most important issues” list.

They’re also working on a very interesting notifications API, which will make it possible to do things like automatically tweet or send email when pages are changed; this will let us set up subject-matter experts to receive notifications whenever pages in their area of expertise are changed.  This will help encourage more active technical reviews of articles, and I think will lead to higher-quality documentation.

There’s also a lot of work being done to make it even easier to customize the software without requiring patches to the code itself.

Check out the roadmap to get some insight into what you can look forward to seeing on MDC in the coming months.

I’ve just finished documenting Firefox 3.1’s support for HTML 5 text in canvas elements, as well as our recently-landed support for shadow effects.  Exciting stuff, complete with an example or two.

If you’re familiar with these technologies, as usual, I’d be thrilled if you’d give these docs a look and make sure they’re coherent and reasonably accurate.  Or vice-versa.