The term Web Docs is often associated with the MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) Web Docs — a documentation repository for web developers used by Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung.
MDN Web Docs is the single best definition of online collaboration, with individual community members constantly making big and small fixes to help incrementally improve its content.
To ensure the long-term health of web platform documentation on the de facto standard resources like the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) Web Docs, Open Web Docs was launched to the public.
According to a blog post by Open Web Docs Co-founder Robert Nyman, “High-quality documentation for web platform technologies is a critically important component of our shared, open digital infrastructure. Today, we’re excited to publicly introduce Open Web Docs, a collective project designed to support a community of technical writers around strategic creation and long-term maintenance of web platform technology documentation that is open and inclusive for all.”
Nyman is the current Staff Developer Advocate & Ecosystem Activation Lead at Google.
It aspires that with the launch of Open Web Docs, resources like the MDN Web Docs will be maintained better and the documentation of core web platform technologies will be sustained. “Open Web Docs is committed to improving existing platforms through our contributions,” Nyman added.
“Collaborating with the community has always been at the heart of MDN Web Docs content work — individual community members constantly make small (and not so small) fixes to help incrementally improve the content, and our partner orgs regularly come on board to help with strategy and documenting web platform features that they have an interest in,” according to Chris Mills, Senior Tech Writer at Mozilla in a blog post at Mozilla Hacks.
For this year, included in the priorities of Open Web Docs is working with MDN writers and engineers to support the recent infrastructure transition and to move forward with key documentation work, developing a community of contributors around core web technology documentation, browser compatibility data, and improving JavaScript documentation.
Updates above this endeavor are available at this website, Github, and Twitter.
The founding sponsors of Open Web Docs are Coil, Google, and Microsoft, with additional financial support from Igalia and generous backers on Open Source Collective. Open Standards proponents Mozilla, Samsung, and W3C also provided additional support and participation to the initiative.