back to article Tech rivals team up for free web dev docs

Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft may seem like strange bedfellows, but the four have joined forces with six other organizations to create Web Platform Docs, a community-driven site that aims to be a one-stop shop for free web-developer documentation. "When you want to build something for the web, it's surprisingly …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Ned (the original)
    Coffee/keyboard

    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhh!

    9 out of 10 of the spotlight articles are about windows 8! How much is microsoft paying you?

    On a more relevant note it's a big thumbs up that they are centralising this kind of documentation.

  2. Guillermo Lo Coco
    Go

    Good initiative. Congrats.

  3. Notas Badoff
    Unhappy

    Out of thin air

    "The site is based on Wikipedia's MediaWiki platform ..." Mildly disturbing then that they don't mention this in the little blurbs at the bottom. Why... no mentions at bottom of any web technologies used at all! That's right, train everybody to take stuff without attribution or acknowledgement... Wait, which companies are involved here?

    1. Michael Hutchinson
      Thumb Down

      Re: Out of thin air

      From the MediaWiki.org website:

      "MediaWiki is free software: this means that you may use it for any purpose without legal hindrance. Furthermore, its licensing conditions apply solely to the software itself. This means that although many wikis license their content under a permissive license, you are not obliged to license the content submitted to your wiki in any particular way. Of course, as a project founded to support sites like Wikipedia, we encourage you to license the texts you write under a free license, but, in short, you are not required to.

      If you wish to alter or amend the software itself, in general, you are permitted to, but there are some restrictions and you should consult the full text of the GNU GPL version 2 for details. Because MediaWiki is provided free of charge, there is no warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law."

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. vagabondo

        Re: Out of thin air

        @Michael Hutchinson

        Not obligatory, but why not be polite? It doesn't cost much

  4. toadwarrior

    pointless

    It seems like there is a lot of dick stroking going on there but nothing of value. I don't see anything there that says they'll work together and that IE will finally support opengl.

    So it all seems like someone is just pissing money away.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

    Just delete w3schools.com...

    ... and then you won't be sending novices down the wrong track every time they want to do something new in CSS, javascript or HTML.

  7. Peter Murphy
    Meh

    Maybe I'm old skool, and don't mind looking at lengthy technical specifications...

    But I'm befuddled by this paragraph:

    "When you want to build something for the web, it's surprisingly difficult to find out how you can implement your vision across all browsers and operating systems," writes Google product manager Alex Komoroske in a blog post announcing the site. "You often need to search across various websites and blogs to learn how certain technologies can be used."

    But isn't most of what you want to discover at good ol' W3C dot org? Here's the HTML 4.01 spec (which is still current), or here's the working draft for HTML5. The documentation for CSS is available at the same place. For me, that's the first port of call for finding out what elements are available - and we're talking about standard elements, not "innovations" that work with one browser. That's how I learned how to write HTML and CSS in the first place.

    Other websites are useful, and I'm not knocking them, but W3C has been invaluable to me over the years.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Maybe I'm old skool, and don't mind looking at lengthy technical specifications...

      Agreed. If w3.org, rfc-editor.org, and ecma-international.org (for ECMA-262, the standard for what's erroneously referred to as "Javascript") don't have what you need, you're likely doing something wrong.

      And if you're dealing with a complex issue that can't be adequately answered by the specifications, I'd suggest asking in a forum that's dominated by language lawyers, so you end up with a solution that conforms to the standard. The relevant Usenet groups used to be good for this, though I haven't been back to them recently.

      Collections of advice scraped from vendors and random developers are not likely to be terribly robust.

  8. KjetilS

    I thought we already had this? Stack Overflow

  9. lambda_beta
    Linux

    Fartbook Mickey$oft, Crapple and Screwgle - Indeed!

    I find it ironic that these were the exact same companies who screw up the web standards in the first place? Now using open source software for their project is just a testimony to how badly web standards have become. I don't trust this at all.

  10. cs94njw
    Thumb Down

    Call me old fashioned, but when someone says here's a website full of the correct information for you to learn from.... I don't expect to have to write it myself :(

    I just hope there's no wackos editing the wikis.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like