At the moment, there is no documentation for the average user. I would be willing to write a draft for this, and even own some to keep it up to date. I'll attach docs to this bug as I write them.

can we do a draft for M19?

Zach, we've developed docs for the Netscape commercial builds. We're trying to get PR3 out the door. We could just check in the docs to the mozilla tree, maybe next week. Seems like that could serve as a basis for mozilla docs. Else, there will be a lot of duplication of effort. The Netscape docs would have to cleaned up---"Netscape" and references to "Instant Messenger" would have to be removed. And there would be other clean up,in addition to any new content that could be added specifically for mozilla. What sort of docs were you proposing? Format? And accessed at the site or installed locally?

Wow. Fast responce. I was thinking of a local docs page accessed from the help menu. That would link to all documentation hosted from mozilla.org. That way, the actuall docs could be changed without forceing everyone to upgrade. As for the type of docs, I am refering to the kind of stuff that you find in a printed manual for software (features, menu items and what they do...) If we are going to start from the NS docs, all the better, it will make things easier. I would be happy to help with making them work, but I don't have cvs/website access. I am in the middle of making the local file right now. I'll attach it for comment soon.

I have access to gila, now and I have some more time too. Can we check the NS docs in and then work on de NSing them to fit mozilla. Once this is done we could get one of the code folks to implement a command in the help menu to point to some place on the mozilla.org site.

from my post to n.p.m.documentation: I filed bug http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54561 a little while ago because "we need some user docs". At present, there are no docs for the users that use mozilla. rudman@netscape.com's comments suggest that the NS docs could be checked into gila and then could be de-NS'd for use with Mozilla (no discussion of AIM, documentation on chatzilla...) Is this going to happen? I would like to be able to work on this, as we should have something for .9 at the latest, but .6 would be much better. A product must have some documentation for the users, even one as simple as a browser, to document the interesting features that make things easier to do and make Mozilla Mozilla.

Zach, reassign to me if you like. I have been working on some user docs, and I'll put them up on the Web for review (together with style guide, and platform-specific style sheets) when they're in a reasonable state of completeness. I can not disagree more strongly with the idea that user docs consist of local links to Net-bound documentation. Online documentation is no good in three cases: (1) the user is not connected to the internet (e.g. if they use Mozilla to browse a CD or an Intranet); (2) the user is using the docs to try and work out why Mozilla isn't connecting to the Net at all; (3) someone is trying to figure out how to use an old version of Mozilla in a decade or so when the links have broken.

mpt: Put them up!

Resetting target milestone from M19 which is meaningless by now. Correct me if I'm wrong.

We have the NS help checked in now, should we mark this FIXED and work on de-netscapeing and working on the docs that we already have?

forget the other patch for now, but pelase checkin the aim patch, we don't need that help.

CC'ing Ian Oeschger on this bug to help get the patches landed.

Ok, I feel bad about this, since I said in comment 6 that I'd write some docs. But I'm doing things in order of effect on Mozilla's usability at the moment. And since Nobody Reads the Help(TM), writing user docs isn't that important, so I probably won't get to it for about three or four years (based on the current rate of improvement in Mozilla's UI). In the meantime, unless the user help content improves dramatically in the near future, I think it would be a good idea to remove (or at least hide) the help function completely. Currently Mozilla's help system seems considerably more embarrassing than useful; and while the presence of a help browser might be expected to spur people to write useful help to put in it, that hasn't happened over the past couple of years. --> default owner

*** Bug 168861 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

"We need some user docs" is too vague a bug statement *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 46917 ***

I've changed my mind. reopening

taking over some of Rudman's bugs

We need to take rudman out of the QA contact field. We also need to decide whether or not to wait until Mozilla is split into FB/TB, etc. User docs for the bloat version will be a LARGE task to say the least. It doesn't make sense to do so if the bloat (monolithic) Seamonkey is to be deprecated.

This was my thought all along, but the documentation is still needed for, say, companies that standadize on the suite - they will need documentation. I still think that FB/TB docs should be of a higher priority (This reminds me: I need to work some more on TB docs) than Seamonkey docs. I don't know... Just my thoughts.

> We need to take rudman out of the QA contact field. We also need to decide Daniel is default QA for all help components, so changing to him. > so if the bloat (monolithic) Seamonkey is to be deprecated. Seamonkey will never be fully deprecated. The Seamonkey docs do need a rewrite badly, but nobody has the time to do it. Firebird Help docs and Help Viewer are done for the most part. Thunderbird doesn't have a working help viewer yet. Help docs for Thunderbird are at http://mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4463. Thunderbird Help Viewer is at http://mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4486. I'm planning on posting the Firebird Help documentation to the Help Viewer home page (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/help-viewer) so that people can read it for errors (without having to download fbh). More Info -> http://firebirdhelp.mozdev.org

tracking bug doesn't need owner / qa

Really out of date.