View source for 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