Oct 23, 2012

Collaboration to Launch Developer Tutorial Site

Major tech companies – Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, W3C and Nokia – have come together to announce the launch of an “authoritative open web standards documentation site called Web Platform Docs.” The new website is said to be an educational tool aimed at developers looking for information on open-web standards like HTML5 and CSS3. According to Opera Software., the site’s focus is to provide detailed documentation on the “many technologies used in web development, best practices for using these technologies and the status of their relative standardization and across-browser implementation.” “We have needed a site like Web Platform Doc for years,” said Lars Erik Bolstad, vice president of Core Technology at Opera Software, in a statement. “Web developers often struggle to find decent information on all the newest technologies that they need to know about; having a single site to turn to that they can trust will save them a lot of time.” W3C says the site will bring professionals in the industry together to share their knowledge with each other. “People in the web community – including browser makers, authoring tool makers and leading edge developers and designers – have tremendous experience and practical knowledge about the web,” said Tim Berners-Lee, director of W3C, in a company release. Berners-Lee adds, “Web Platform Docs is an ambitious project where all of us who are passionate about the web can share knowledge and help one another.” W3C says Web Platform Docs will be used as a place for developers to gain access to “current, cross-browser and cross-device coding best practices, including:

How to use each feature of the Open Web Platform, with syntax and examples;
The interoperability of various technologies across platforms and devices;
The standardization status of each technology specification;
The stability and implementation status of features.”

Opera Software notes that although the site is a wiki, the content is maintained daily through funding and staff, so developers can be sure the information given is “accurate and up-to-date.” Opera Software says it is there hope that the “entire web community will come forward to help maintain and improve the content.” Regardless of the staff on board, Chris Mills, Opera web evangelist and dev.opera.com managing editor, insist that the project is a “community effort.” “We don’t want this to come across as the giants of the web telling everyone else what to do,” said Mills. “It’s your site – it’s a wiki, so anyone can add to it and improve existing content.” Web Platform Docs can be found at WebPlatform.org and includes a document and tutorials section as well as a forum, blog and chat. Topics being discussed on the site include: HTML5, CSS, Canvas, WEBGL, SVG, Transforms, Video, Audio, Animations, Media Queries, IndexedDB and File API. In a TechWorld article, Michael Champion, senior program manager for Microsoft Open Technologies subsidiary, says, “It has been a great start, but this is [only] the beginning of the effort. It is not a finished product.”