2004-04-11 - Summary of Mozilla Help Viewer Developer Meeting

Present: rlk, brantgurga, nilson, jwalden, wolf

Instead of using XHTML, we should move to XML so that we can automatically generate Help TOC RDF.
rlk has a script that reads directly from the XML file without having to play around with RDF.
We should use DocBook, but we will need to make our own modifications (such as automatically generating the table of contents at the beginning of every help file). Regular DocBook should definetely be supported.
XSLT will style all of the files. Most of the work is already done in MozDev Bug 5638.

Firefox Help website needs to be fused with the Seamonkey Help Website.
rlk has a rewrite of the page. The CSS isn't 100% compatible with IE, but it is good enough :).
Bugs and source code for Firefox Help will continue to be held on mozdev.org because mozilla.org doesn't provide us with enough flexibility.

Could make it easier to manage the API.
We will have to use the chrome preprocessor extensively. help.xul would be difficult because it is almost the exact opposite from Seamonkey's help.xul.
This could decrease program readabilty significantly.
Probably will not be implemented. Not enough advantages.

rlk doesn't think he is the right person to do this. Doesn't have enough time to work extensively on documentation.
dwx should take this position, but he says he's too busy.
stefan_h might be interested. We might consider it once we get more patches from him.

Asked ben to review, but never got a reply. Bug is nominated as a 0.9 blocker. mconnor says that ben will get around to it.
Firefox Help isn't appearing in installer builds. Jswalden filed a bug (bug 240277).
Firefox Help 1.1 XPI has been put on the ftp servers and should be released at the same time as the new website is posted.