As we fully embrace the concept of an entire knowledge base acting as the Firefox manual when you click on Firefox Help, there are some structural changes to the help documentation imported from CVS. By far, the biggest and most notable change is in the Options window reference.
The Options window reference is our biggest article. It is already beyond our size limit for screenshots, without screenshots for secondary option windows (e.g. Fonts, Advanced JS, Languages, Warning messages, etc.). The markup is very complicated, because it contains both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0 content, and will contain Firefox 3.1 content. Updating it for Firefox 3.1 is hard to do because of the size and complexity of the markup.
For Firefox 3.1, we would like to split up the Options window reference into sub-articles (one article for each panel). The parent article would include a link to each sub-article, along with a description of each panel, which will also appear at the top of each sub-article. Each sub-article should have a link back to the parent article at the bottom.
This wouldn’t be difficult, if it weren’t for one thing: The actual Options window panels in Firefox each have a [Help] button, which links straight to each section of the Options window article. These are called help-topic links. If a translation of the Options window article has not been split into sub-articles when we update the help-topic link URLs, those help-topic links will not work for that locale (They will actually fall back to the English versions). We need to make sure all translations of the parent article are split, before updating help-topic links.
In order to lessen the workload on localizers, we evaluated how much of this plan we can do ourselves. Basically, what we need is the new text translated. The actual implementation can be done by us. I’ve created a text file, containing all the text that needs to be translated.
Firefox Support locale leaders should translate this text file, and send the translation to me.
If you want to implement it yourself, that would be appreciated; but it should be noted if you are a Firefox product localizer, any work on Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 should be done before this. For more information on the Support changes for Firefox 3.1, details are on wiki.mozilla.org.