Benjamin D. Smedberg wrote:
I've been reading the discussion with interest, and want to layout some ideas for structure/metadata/organization:
We have roughly two different types of content that I'm aware of: reference material, and "articles".
I think that's probably too simplistic, see me post "DevMo Guideline Proposal"
REFERENCE MATERIAL
Reference material, e.g. the MSDN "DHTML Reference" at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/dhtml_reference_entry.asp, includes DOM/HTML/XUL/SVG documentation, XPCOM interface documentation (both frozen and non-frozen), xpinstall API reference, etc.
This material has the following characteristics:
* It needs constant updating as mozilla adds support for new DOM/etc specifications.
* It needs to be deeply and widely cross-referenced.
* We want to keep historical information available (e.g. mozilla started supporting document.load() in release x.x, and XMLHttpRequest in release y.y.
I agree that the developers should keep the documents up to date, but I think the document should only be published for each public release of the software and older reference docs should remain online. In other words, the maintenance of the document should not necessarily be part of the CMS.
Why only release new documents with new actual releases? Lots of development (both internal and external) goes on between releases, and the docs should, if possible, reflect the current state of play. Extensiion developers, for example, often try to keep up with changes in nightly builds so that, when the next major release comes along, the extension is already working.
It would be fantastic if there was some magic way to get a version of a doc as it applied to some particular release; if the docs are stored in a made-up XML format, that should be quite possible by introducing some attribute which indicates which release a particular piece of text applies to.
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