Just wondering why we don't use the "Using Mail" section of the Mozilla programs help as the basis for Thunderbird's documentation? --Roan
why not Mozillla docs? well...
Basically, the docs are overly large, make things more complicated than they should be, and don't fit well with the idea of "keep it simple" that Firefox and (to a lesser degree) Thunderbird have.--Waldo 06:28, 20 Jan 2005 (PST)
using Mozilla docs as base for Thunderbird docs
I like the "keep it simple" philosophy, and I should have said base Thunderbird's help files on the Mozilla Suites help files. I think having something for people to use and work from may incourage more help. To that end, I have created a help extention for Thunderbird (This is the only place I've announced this extension).
If announced to the general Thunderbird user base, would this extension hurt or help this documentation project?--Roan 10:35, 20 Jan 2005 (PST)
(and I just had a chance to try it on a Windows machine--not working, installs but there is something in the Windows version that is preventing it from parsing the xhtml files correctly.--Roan 16:07, 20 Jan 2005 (PST))
The extension may or may not come in handy; there's an extension posted on bug 253334 which I've been using to try and get Help working in Thunderbird. With what I have now, everything theoretically looks okay on the surface. The only problem is the Help menu isn't properly overlaid, which is a rather huge problem. Unfortunately, facilities to debug this are mostly non-existent, so I don't actually know what's wrong. However, I'll keep this in mind as I work on the bug.--Waldo 21:46, 27 Jan 2005 (PST)
help extention working on Windows
I finally figured out the problem. On Windows the help system doesn't have the latin1 and HTMLspecial (i.e. mdash) character entities available. Don't know why Windows doesn't and Mac and Linux versions do. I downloaded the dtd files and referenced them in the xhtml files and help content is now visible. --Roan 17:34, 31 Jan 2005 (PST)