Thunderbird:Help Documentation:Style Guidelines

The guidelines for how Help documents should be written (for this wiki -- there's a slightly different set of guidelines that applies once these documents have been added to the mozilla.org source tree) fall into two main areas: language and coding style. Because the coding style issues are more applicable to when the documents are actuallly in the mozilla.org tree for building, most of the issues covered will be those of language.

Language

Keep it clear, structured, and generally useful. If it's something that the average user isn't likely to do, it probably shouldn't be in the built-in Help. The excellent Thunderbird Help site and other such resources are available for the power user. We can't fill every need because of space restrictions, so we should let other resources fill them.

Spell things right! Spelling and grammar are somewhat nitpicky, true, but I guarantee you'll find a user who's put off by such mistakes. Try to keep things good by yourself for now, and when docs start getting added to the main mozilla.org source code, we'll go over them again to make sure everything's right. Also, if there are multiple ways to spell something, choose one way and spell it that way consistently.

Use the text from the UI. If the menu item's written a certain way, then you should write it out that way, capitalization and all.

Refer to the application as "Mozilla Thunderbird" once at the beginning of each document and in the article title (if you'd want to refer to the application by name), but after that refer to it as "Thunderbird".

Short and concise are the rules of the game. We don't want verbosity if it can be avoided.

Coding

The big rule: don't use wiki markup! We won't be able to use wiki markup when the docs get added to the source code, and most HTML markup is still valid in this wiki.