926500 - What to do about Firefox OS open web app components

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Apps, defect)

Description

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
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Hi all!

This comes out of a couple of conversations I had with Fred Wenzel and Eric Pang at the Toronto Moz Summit.

Eric quite rightly pointed out that the current components/building blocks info we have on the App Center on MDN is out of date:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Design/Building_Blocks
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Design/Design_asset_library

I also talked with Fred about the issue of Firefox OS components/templates, etc., which ones we want to officially support, and how to move forward.

* We have Mortar, which could do with some more detailed information about: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Developing/App_templates is a bit sparse and short on details. One more point - I've heard a bit of feedback from a few places that Mortar is over-complicated and is being simplified.
* We have Brick, which is awesome, but at an early stage. Potch is intending to update it to have a more easily-skinnable architecture when the opportunity presents itself. The Telefonica guys like Brick, and have offered to create component skins for Brick, e.g. a Gaia skin, and an Android skin perhaps. We need to hook them up when it is in a position to do that.
* We have the components at buildingfirefoxos.com, which would possibly compete/clash with Brick if the above Brick proposal goes to plan. But probably not much, as I doubt many of the components map directly.
* Another potential issue is that some of the Gaia folk don't think developers should be using the Gaia look and feel for non-Gaia apps.

So I'd like to discuss what is best to do here. Obviously I'd like to tread on as few toes as possible. 

Should we move the buildingfirefoxos.com material to MDN (I'm sure this was discussed in the past), replacing the outdated Building blocks material, and then add a detailed account of the Brick components and how to use them alongside, when we get it to that stage? I'm still not sure what the official position is on the Gaia skin, and whether we should be offering that to 3rd party devs.

What problems would this solve?
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out of date/confusing/duplicate content.

Who would use this?
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All app devs

What would users see?
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better, more centralised docs

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
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nothing

Is there anything else we should know?
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Comment 1

[Janet Swisher]

Not sure why this is assigned to me. Ali, what do you have in mind for me to do here?

Comment 2

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

This probably ought to be me. I'll take it for now.

Comment 3

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

I think this is obsolete now. Re-open if not.