The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced the release of Web Platform Docs, a new community-driven site that will be a source for Web developer documentation. The W3C, the group that oversees the development of HTML and other web standards, is moving beyond dry, boring specifications with a new venture into developer documentation.
The W3C has just launched an alpha preview of Web Platform Docs, a community-driven site the W3C is hoping will become the go-to source for learning how to build the web.
The W3C, in collaboration with Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera and others, has announced today the alpha release of Web Platform Docs (docs.webplatform.org).
The goal of the W3C’s Web Platform Docs is twofold: get tons of great documentation all under one roof, and then — the most challenging part — make sure that it stays up to date. Solving the second problem is no small task. The web is currently littered with great tutorials on CSS Flexbox, which are, unfortunately, all wrong now that the Flexbox spec has been changed. The same is true of Web Sockets tutorials, Indexdb tutorials and any other tutorial on a spec that has changed or might change in the future.
These days keeping up with the rapidly changing world of web standards is a full-time job and who better to tell you what’s going on, how you can use new tools and when browsers will support them than the people actually writing standards and building browsers?
The W3C has managed to bring together some of the biggest names on the web to help create Web Platform Docs. Representatives from Opera, Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Nokia will all be lending their expertise to the new site.
While the list of participating companies is impressive, Web Platform Docs is also a wiki that anyone, not just W3C reps, can edit. As the W3C’s Douglas Schepers tells Webmonkey, “anyone can contribute and everyone is on equal footing.”
If your head is bursting with tutorials, code snippets, examples or solutions to common development problems, head on over to the site and sign up so you can contribute. Bear in mind that this is an alpha release. While the site looks great and has the basic features of a wiki up and running, many of the features Schepers mentions in the intro blog post aren’t available just yet. “In the spirit of ‘release early, release often’, we decided to announce the site at the earliest possible point and improve it in public,” writes Schepers.
Right now the content of the site is primarily documentation, but the plan is to include tips and best practices along with up-to-date information on standardization progress and browser support for individual features. Other cool planned features include a way to share code snippets and an API for some aspects of the site.
For an overview of the site and to learn a bit more about where the W3C plans to go with Web Platform Docs, check out the video below.
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