How to reach us:

The newsgroup for discussing Mozilla editor issues is netscape.public.mozilla.editor. It is gatewayed into the mailing list mozilla-editor; subscribe here (put "subscribe" as the subject of the message).

Want to know who to bug, this table is your best resource.

Design documents for the new editor

The new editor will be entirely new code, based on the new Gecko layout engine.

If you're interested in Composer in the old Mozilla codebase (pre-NGlayout); be warned that this code is no longer being developed or maintained, but is still in the tree for those who might want to reference it.

Specs For the New Editor

Please feel free to comment on these specs in the editor newsgroup/mailing list; see the community page for details on how to subscribe.

• Known Editor Usability Issues (Dogfood) What do we need to fix in order for the editor to be usable for simple daily editing tasks?
• Milestones Schedule info: which features do we expect to add in each Mozilla milestone?
• Composer Font-end Test Plans.
• Key Event Specification Not just for the editor, but for the whole Mozilla app.
• Selection spec Selection is part of layout, but the editor team is implementing it
• Transaction/Undo Manager A general-purpose set of classes, usable by clients outside the editor too
• HTML Typing Rules The rules specifying what happens when the user hits space, return, etc. in various document contexts.
• Adding a new method to the Editor Interfaces What files do you need to modify to change one of the nsIEditor interfaces?

UI Specs

• Writing Property Dialogs for 5.0 that use the Advanced Edit feature

These currently describe behavior for 4.x Communicator versions combined with early 5.0 development work. We will update these pages as designs for 5.0 evolve:

• Dialog Specs
• Table Editing Specs
• Editor Widget Requirements
  This describes features that the general widgets need to support to implement our current UI behaviors.

Tools

• Editor API Logging
  Allows users to record edits made to a document and play them back.

Using the Editor

• We are making a major push to get the editor sufficiently functional so that people can start using it for their day-to-day tasks. We call this "dogfood", a term you'll hear a lot on mozilla. We have created a list of dogfood issues, and we invite your feedback.

Other useful documents:

• Composer runtime table
• How to modify an idl file in the XPCOM IDL world