Agenda/Notes

The MDN community meeting takes place in the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org at 10 AM PDT (17:00) UTC). Note temporary time change for those outside North America! It's open to anyone that would like to participate, so please feel free to join in!

Events

• Upcoming MDN doc sprints: local meetups are encouraged
  • March 22-23; themes: Web Workers (April DevDerby), Web device APIs? (Moved up from March 29-30 due to Easter)
  • April 26-27; themes: getUserMedia (May DevDerby), ???
    • In person with devs in Vancouver
  • May 31-June 1?; themes: ??? (June DevDerby?) (moved out a week due to US Memorial Day on May 27)

Kuma

What's new? [Question by teoli, answers by Sheppy? :-)]

• Dashboard: I see the "New:" keyword before new pages
• Support for getting page summary from KumaScript and the API
• Tables default to "standard-table"
• "Launch" item in context menu for links
• Fonts and CSS from Gaia available for use in samples
• Photoshop file attachments allowed now (for example, for UI mockups, such as for Firefox OS apps)

What's expected very soon? [Question by teoli, answers by Sheppy? :-)]

• Replacing Google search with Elastic Search
• l10n Dashboard (critical to maintain translated Fx OS docs!) Bug #834317, please give feedback about the design. How would this work for you as a localizer?
• API support for attachments; this will help automate construction of content from source materials using scripts.
• Table-of-contents (TOC) depth limits on specific pages, for example, to keep API reference pages from displaying "Parameters" repeatedly for each method in the page TOC.
• More general tweaks and improvements

Content

• Site redesign update [asked by teoli; sheppy, maybe?]
  • Future meetings on the site redesign will be open to anyone interested, regularly scheduled, and announced on dev-mdc.
  • New MDN style guide is in progress; a first draft will be available before the end of March.
  • Style guide will be used to help figure out a lot of details of the redesign.
  • Navigability improvements will be a big feature of the redesign; by doing site redesign and style redesign in tandem, we can make the experience better. For example, the plan is to move the page TOC into the sidebar so that it's visible even if you scroll the page, and it should become possible to link related pages together to make it easier to get from, say, the page documenting a method on a DOM interface back to the interface itself, or to other methods in the interface.
  • A lot of Chinese users want to have a Chinese language homepage of MDN. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=844864 Meteormatt 10:20, 13 March 2013 (PDT)
    • Use Verbatim: https://localize.mozilla.org/projects/mdn/
  • Sheppy: Because MDN will be hiring another writer in the coming months, as well as a community manager (meaning we get Janet's bandwidth back from that one way or another), we will have more writer-hours to put into documentation. I plan to spend much more of my time working on the style guide and the site reorganization work once the writer is hired.
• "DOM Reference" structure [teoli, but discussion launched on IRC by Jeremie]
  • Sheppy: Part of that work I'll be doing will be to clean up and restructure the DOM Reference into a general Web reference. It's not just about the DOM anymore, and hasn't been for a long time. The site redesign will help with that as well. It's going to be easier to more clearly label content as to what platforms, technologies, etc it's related to.
  • Teoli: I do think we should take a couple of pages and try to update them as a "demo".
  • sheppy: Yes, I think so too. Although we may have to mock them up outside the wiki, since a lot of the changes I'm looking at will rely on the site redesign to really feel right. Or at least we need to keep in mind some of the improvements we will get with the redesign.
  • teoli: Yeah, but we can make a page with h2/h3 and integrate WebIDL
  • davidbruant: I see 2 different sort of docs: reference and guide. It might be worth distinguishing them, maybe in URLs
  • sheppy: Guide content, I'm thinking, could go under separate sections of the docs (WebAPI, Telephony, etc etc). The reference stuff is probably going to move to /docs/DOM/Reference/... Actually, probably /docs/Web/Reference/...
  • teoli: It is important that the Reference page have predictable URL
  • sheppy: With docs/DOM being a landing page that links to the DOM content in the Web reference, has links to tutorials and introductions, etc. I think doing this makes things a lot more predictable, and puts all the reference material for all the Web-related APIs in one handy place, easy to get at and look through. And much more predictable for linking to.
  • davidbruant: (is there a place in the style guide/redesign info where this could be written up so that we don't forget about it?)
  • sheppy: Not yet, but it's been planned all along to be like this. Also, I'm noting it down in my own notes right now so I put it in the guide as I get to that part. - one last thing - we'll look at iterating on a design for DOM reference pages in the next few days

Staff

• alispivak: we're going to be hiring a few positions, including a Sr. level writing/editing position. just wanted to give the community a heads up - the position should be posted by the end of the month. I will give more information when it gets posted, but I encourage writers to apply.
  • Meteor: Is there such postion in China?
  • alispivak: hm. That might be difficult because Mozilla China is a separate entity & I'm not sure I can hire there....
• alispivak: Also, we are adding a full time community manager. I'm still working on the requirements for that one. That will be a developer engagement community manager, not just MDN. I'm writing the job description now - it will cover MDN plus evangelism communities.

Triage?

• Teoli: I see a few big things needing doc in the next few months (beside Fx OS & WebAPIs):
  • Web Components: the first part is now under development, and should land this cycle. But the new <template> and co HTML will need tutorial and a lot of docs. The spec is still in flux for the moment.
  • Web Audio API: huge and important, all docs out there are very Webkit-oriented; also nearing completion and there are a lot of "DOM" objects to add and document. So it will become urgent as soon as the pref for it is planned to be switched on (we will have about 12 weeks to do it)
  • Web Activities
  • Content Security Policy (CSP); the dev volunteered to write docs, but will need help and support. 1.0 is a Rec right now and both Google and Mozilla are updating their implementation.
    • davidbruant: I'll be very happy to help for CSP doc review, etc. (but if others want to learn about it, I'm also very happy to let them help Ian)
  • teoli: CSP may have consequences on our HTTP docs and so on. And given that our changes just broke the Sony Playstation Store Web sites, I think Ian is under pressure.
• jms: Maybe use these as doc sprint "themes"? Teoli: Yes, but not for a few months; they're not ready yet.