31479 - about:demo

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Help Documentation, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Henrik Gemal]

what about an about:demo or about:features?
Think advertising - for a 'storefront' - show off all the Mozilla coolness here 
for the few and new who want to see what Mozilla is capable of.

Comment 1

[Sammy Ford]

henrik, this is doable but someone needs to write the html/css/js for the page 
that you want to load. Maybe you can excercise mozilla's features and post the 
sources at which point i could hook it up for you.

Comment 2

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I think, this is a good idea. <about:feature> could show a summary of "best"
features. <about:feature/-area-> (e.g. <about:feature/mailnews/viewer/html> or
<about:feature/core/chrome/skin>) could list features of a certain area. Until
here, HTML should be sufficient (assuming the protocol handler is hooked up).

Feature "leafs" (feature "primitives") could link to an animated or even
interactive demo. This part is probaly a lot of work.

verah, are you likely to implement at least the first part? If not, can you add
a helpwanted keyword?

Comment 3

[verah (gone)]

Sorry, I can't do this at present. I could provide a list of features we 
might want to highlight, and some text, if someone else could author this. 

Adding the helpwanted keyword.

Comment 4

[leger]

Updating QA Contact to elig...welcome back!

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

qa assigning open/resolved help bugs to paw

Comment 6

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

spam: mass-moving currently open help bugs to Terri, who now does qa on 'em. :)

Comment 7

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Hey, I know -- let's include a Quake clone written in XUL.

Comment 8

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

[e-mail]: Can you please upload your list as an attachment 
to the bug. I may be interested in working on this.

Comment 9

[verah (gone)]

Oh good! I'll create the list/descriptions as soon as possible. Probably Tuesday 
12/5. When I've got that I'll reassign to Zach.

Comment 10

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

cool. I can't do anything too hard, but I can sure try!

Comment 11

[verah (gone)]

Here we go... sorry for the delay; I've been sick as a dog. I'm attaching
documents that sort of outline/describe four "about..." demos that I think would
be good. I'm suggesting the following:

About Mozilla's End User Features (you'd probably want a different title)
About My Sidebar (for developers -- who want to create tabs)
About Themes (for people who want to create themes)
About Standards Support

There may be more possibilities, or better possibilities, but these are the ones
that come to my mind. I've provided some text (and three gifs), but these are
naturally Netscape-centric seeing as how I've been writing Netscape stuff for
the past three years! However, I'm hopeful that the examples will help you write
text appropriate for Mozilla.

You might want to look at the "What's New in Netscape 6" piece, which is a tour
of features. It's not really a demo, in that the reader is not led through a
series of steps and there's nothing animated or anything fancy like that.

Reassigning to Zach. Good luck!

Comment 12

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: Outline of an "About Features" doc.

Comment 13

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: GIF file for "About Features" doc

Comment 14

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: GIF file for "About Features" doc

Comment 15

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: GIF file for "About Features" doc

Comment 16

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: Outline for "About My Sidebar" doc

Comment 17

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: Outline for "About Standards" doc

Comment 18

[verah (gone)]

Attachment: Outline for "About Themes" doc

Comment 19

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

accepting bug. The first thing that comes to mind for me is how to animate 
stuff. I was thinking flash, except I don't have flash and flash doesn't come 
with mozilla. I can't export director as shockwave or java applets because 
mozilla doesn't come with shockwave or java by standard. This leaves 
animated gifs. Does anyone have any better ideas?

Comment 20

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

JavaScript and the DOM? That would demonstrate our cool standard support at the
same time for those who care...

Comment 21

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

DUH! Time to play with dreamweaver timelines and make them work in 
mozilla.

Comment 22

[Alan]

Faking it using Mozilla keywords!
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

Create a bookmark as normal to whatever it is you want
Then go to bookmark properties
set the keyword to 
about:demo
or 
about:features 
or 
about:whateveryoulike

Now if you type about:demo in the location bar mozilla will automagically
follow your link.  

Comment 23

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

There isn't much need to fake it with keywords because we can just hook 
it right into the browser. The problem is getting the demo site. Once we 
have the site ready, hooking it up is no problem. I'm still not sure exactly 
when I plan to have this done, but It's higher on my list than before.

Comment 24

[Daniel Wang]

how about bug 170240?

Comment 25

[Daniel Wang]

about:feature would be better served by bug 103608
about:demo might be better served by bug 170240
and some of the stuff mentioned could go into Mozilla Help files

Comment 26

[Daniel Wang]

Attachment: demo: Tabbed Browser

Graphical version of what demo could be

Comment 27

[Daniel Wang]

Attachment: demo: Theme

how-to-make-a-skin is overkill to be put in the Help files

Comment 28

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

What you show is more like a tutorial. I thought a demo where something which
doesn't teach, but just shows some cool things. I guess that would stress the
Gecko renderer, then, rather than the UI. Like that 3D cube (lost the URL),
something like netcenter's news boxes, but implemented on the client side and
with tabs, some cool resizable SVG, a webpage how it *should* look like ;) etc..

Comment 29

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

s/where/were

oh, and if you make a tutorial, instead of showing screenshots, why not mark the
real UI elements with a red (blinking?) flame, like the DOM inspector does?

Comment 30

[Daniel Wang]

Attachment: demo: search in location bar

Comment 31

[Daniel Wang]

Attachment: demo: Caret Browsing

Comment 32

[Daniel Wang]

Ben, you are right. Perhaps all the attachments could go into
about:features (or bug 103608, or bug 170240)?

Comment 33

[Gábor Stefanik]

about:abandoned? Or is there work still going on on this?

Comment 34

[RickieES aka Ricardo Palomares]

Is this really wanted yet? Some features explained in the attachments sample files are not available any longer, others are now common in most browsers...

Comment 35

[Philip Chee]

It's dead Jim. =>WONTFIX.