Today, we are taking another step forward in helping developers achieve the goal of interoperability through same markup. We’re happy to be part of creating Web Platform Docs (WPD), a new W3C hosted community resource for developers and designers who use open Web standards. For developers the Web is about building great experiences with the potential to reach millions of people around the world by writing interoperable sites and applications. We’ve talked many times about the promise of interoperability through the same standards-based markup yielding the same results.
The W3C, Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia and Opera have teamed up to create and seed this new community-driven site whose aim is to become a central repository for Web developer documentation.
- Clear reference docs that are accurate, complete, and indicate adoption rate.
- Thoughtful tutorials for existing and new technologies.
- A sample library that takes into account real-world scenarios.
- The ability to see—at a glance—which technologies are on a standard track and the stability and implementation status of features.
WPD uses MediaWiki as its platform, and in the model of Wikipedia, WPD’s strength comes from a global assembly of volunteer developer contributors. Anyone can become a member, anyone can contribute, and the resulting community creates and manages the content through collaboration and mitigation. The W3C is the site’s convener and administrator. The founding organizations (and others who wish to join with financial support for the project) are known as stewards. The stewards help in infrastructure decisions and will have members act as contributors with the same rights as every other member who joins on their own. The stewards seeded WPD with topics donated from already-published content (over 3,200 topics from MSDN) and will continue to add content moving forward.
We view this as an opportunity to combine our information with that of other creators of developer content in a way in which the whole will become greater than the sum of its parts. Having developer content assembled in WPD means the data that’s important to your planning is centrally located and accurate. You won’t have to look at competing sites and wrestle with conflicting information. At the same time, evolving or proprietary APIs will be included, and they will be clearly marked as such. And when a topic is missing information or contains an error, you can flag it for a community member to update—or do it yourself.
It has been a pleasure and an honor working with our global and diverse partners in making this site a reality, and this is just the beginning for WPD. Creating a comprehensive standard reference library that drives standard adoption will take an ongoing concerted effort. We believe that part of building a highly interoperable Web browser means providing developers with the resources to achieve an environment where the same code and markup delivers the same results. And that makes the Web better for everyone.
— Eliot Graff, Content Publishing, Internet Explorer