Documentation Taxonomy

Status

This page is currently a very early scratch-pad for working up a documentation taxonomy.

Purpose

The purpose of a documentation taxonomy is to provide at least a single, comprehensive, core conceptual structure to the documentation set we will be producing. Right now the structure is extremely flat -- this is intentional, as the various technologies listed below tend to cross our "audience" borders regularly. I'm leaving the "root" node off here and listing the rest in discrete topics that are supposed to be relatively self-contained.

I'm thinking that eventually a high level of the taxonomy (not the root, but one or maybe two levels down) will be used to define some custom namespaces within the wiki. Without having to do any hackery, MediaWiki will support up to 50 custom namespaces (plus 50 related Talk namespaces, for 100 total). The namespaces will provide flexibility and some basic structure than we would have within a single namespace.

Or at least that's my current working theory. I'll know more after I've had time to mess around with my testwiki.

PLEASE feel free to modify the list below -- I'm still familiarizing myself with some of the technologies involved (and am cribbing wildly off lists I've found in various places). Some of the following may need to be split into separate topics, or some nested within others, others just deleted or added.

Taxonomy List (rough)

Accessibility

Assistive technologies and related development efforts.

AOM

Application Object Model.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets.

DHTML

Dynamic HTML.

DOM

"The Document Object Model is an API for HTML and XML documents. It does two things for web developers: it provides a structural representation of the document, and it defines the way that that structure is to be accessed from script, allowing you to get at the web page as a structured group of nodes, which we will discuss shortly. Essentially, it connects web pages to scripts or programming languages."

Embedding Mozilla

Embeddable browser and HTML editor SDK.

Extensions

Small add-ons for extending the functionality of Mozilla applications.

Gecko

Browser engine.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language.

JavaScript

Scripting language.

Layout

???

Mozilla as a Platform

Developing applications using the Mozilla platform.

Mozilla Hacking

Developing Mozilla technologies.

Necko (?)

"The network library (Necko) provides a platform-independent API for several layers of networking ranging from transport to presentation layers. This API is used in the Mozilla client and can be used for writing other networking clients."

NSPR

"Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) provides a platform-neutral API for system level and libc like functions. The API is used in the Mozilla client, many of Netscape/AOL/iPlanet's and other software offerings."

Open Source Development

Open Source development practices and such.

Plugins

Plugin development docs.

RDF

Resource Description Framework, W3C technology.

Remote Applications

Development of remote applications.

Scripting

General topic, not sure if this belongs on the list.

Security

Anything and everything related to security technologies in Mozilla.

Testing (QA, etc)

Docs related to QA, testing, bug reporting, etc.

Themes

Theme development docs.

Toolkit Apps

...

Tools

Any documentation related to development tools such as Bugzilla, Bonsai, LXR, etc.

Web Standards

Web standards, best practices, using standards in web development, etc.

XBL

Extensible Binding Language, used in describing bindings that can be attached to elements in other documents.

XML

Extensible Markup Language.

XPCOM

Cross Platform Component Object Model.

XPInstall

Cross Platform Installer (presumably).

XSL

Extensible Stylesheet Language.

XSLT

XSL Transformations language.

XPToolkit

...

XUL

XML User Interface Language.

Other Stuff

• Cross References
• Image Handling