Documenting the Web Platform
summary
Open Web Docs funds a four‑person writing team and drives MDN’s migration to GitHub, converting about 90% to Markdown, adding pull‑request workflow and previews; MDN now hosts roughly 12,000 pages and records 1,000 contributors in the first ten months on GitHub. Reference pages use an interactive example, copy‑pasteable syntax box, parameter/return sections and links to specs. The project extracts structured data into the browser-compat-data JSON/npm package, consumed by caniuse, IDEs and tooling, and proposes reintegrating machine‑readable spec data back into docs.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:51About Open Web Docs
- 1:49The values of Open Web Docs
- 3:18What does Open Web Docs do?
- 4:40MDN's move to GitHub
- 7:32HTML vs. Markdown
- 8:54What does MDN document?
- 10:06What is actually documentation?
- 12:04Reference documentation vs. specification
- 13:19A typical MDN reference page
- 15:16Browser compatibility data
- 16:25IDEs and DevTools
- 17:22Specification data
- 18:38How to contribute
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