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)

1. Accessibility
2. AOM
3. Cross References (questionable for this level)
4. CSS
5. DHTML
6. DOM
7. Embeddable Mozilla
8. Extensions
9. Gecko
10. HTML
11. Image Handling
12. Java
13. JavaScript
14. Layout
15. Mozilla as a Platform
16. Mozilla Hacking
17. Necko (?)
18. NSPR
19. Open Source Development
20. Parser
21. Plugins
22. RDF
23. Remote Applications
24. Scripting
25. Security
26. Testing (QA, etc)
27. Themes
28. Toolkit Apps
    1. Browser
    2. Calendar
    3. Composer
    4. Mail/News
29. Tools
    1. Bugzilla
    2. Bonsai
    3. LXR
    4. CVS
    5. Mozilla Code Documentation (Doxygen-generated)
    6. Tinderbox
    7. Talkback-public (searchable crash reports)
    8. DOM Inspector
    9. JavaScript Debugger
30. Web Standards (not sure about this one)
31. XBL
32. XML
33. XPCOM
34. XPConnect
35. XPIDL
36. XPInstall
37. XSLT
38. XUL