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W3C’s Web Platform Docs – Your “Go To” for All Things Web Development

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From:

Jean Paoli, President, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Michael Champion, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

 

We are thrilled to share the news that the W3C announced the alpha release of Web Platform Docs. Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia and Opera are among the stewards of the project. Together, we worked with the W3C on creating this wiki-styled site and contributed thousands of web documentation articles.

W3C’s Web Platform Docs is a community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for developers to help them build modern web applications that will work across browsers and devices, and share their own expertise, which will further the goal of web platform interoperability and same markup.

Currently, developers need to do a lot of research about what technologies work on which platforms when building websites and applications with HTML5, CSS and other open web standards. It’s costly and inefficient for them to spend precious hours consulting multiple resources to understand how to employ web technologies in a way that functions across browsers, operating systems and devices. W3C’s Web Platform Docs addresses these issues by offering a single “go-to” source for web developer documentation, and providing a site that the community can continually edit and improve.

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., represented by Michael Champion, and the Microsoft Internet Explorer team represented by Eliot Graff, have been involved from the very inception of the project as we strongly believe this community site is key in the journey to an interoperable web platform and same markup.

As an initial contribution, Microsoft donated more than 3,200 topics from MSDN and will continue to add content moving forward. This is an open community – web developers can get an account at webplatform.org to make their own contribution – fill in gaps, correct errors, and flesh out the documentation with sample code to explain how to use the web platform to its full potential.

So what does this mean for you, the developer?

You will save time and resources, knowing you can consult with confidence a community-curated site to learn about standards, innovations and best practices including:

  • What technologies really interoperate across platforms and devices;
  • The standardization status of each technology specification;
  • The stability and implementation status of specific features in actual browsers.

W3C’s Web Platform Docs is an open site where anyone can become a member and contribute. Microsoft and the other founding stewards helped boot up the wiki (and will continue to contribute new content), but YOU, the developer community, own the site. W3C convened the community and will administer webplatform.org in the future, but you don’t have to join W3C to participate in this effort.

All materials on W3C’s Web Platform Docs are freely available and licensed to foster sharing and reuse.

Begin simplifying your web development and check out W3C’s Web Platform Docs today. Better still, sign up for an account, find a topic of interest, and contribute your expertise!