The bottom line is, educators know that the average person does not benefit from learning styles that suit very talented learners.
[snip] > <box>, <description>, <label>, all easy. <button> easy. etc etc. > Now he wants to do something non-trivial with data. Either he > avoids <tree> and <template>, using XUL like HTML, or he learns > them. He figures he'll learn them, he'll know all about XUL then.
After reading through your very verbose posts, let me extract a few comments. First, I am pretty sure that in your posts you really don't mean "layout" in the mozilla sense. Pretty much all of the questions you raise (template updating, RDF, tree styling, etc) are not "layout". If you do mean layout, could you say explicitly what parts of layout you think should be documented?
Also, it seems that much of your commentary is directed toward medium and high-level documentation. Everyone in the mozilla project agrees that more complete documentation at every level would be useful. But rather than saying "it needs to be easier to learn", please identify specific material that is not well-documented. Wandering generalities don't help anyone.
> Model-View-Controller is a design pattern that is widely-established > tool used to inform the building of GUI-based applications. Mozilla
What's your point? You could do a strict MVC system using RDF datasources and templates, but the mozilla architecture doesn't force this upon the developer...
> enabling a digestible implementation. People must be > able to easily comprehend what they work with. No amount > of "line-in-the-sand" policy will stop them needing concepts
There is no way to make the guts of mozilla "easily comprehensible". Not even the best Mozilla layout programmers realy comprehend the whole of it. There has been some great work recently at documenting large-scale relationships: e.g. biesi's doc on how non-native content is handled, and jkeiser's great introduction a while back on how HTML is parsed into content and fed into the layout engine.
--BDS
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