Microsoft Donates JavaScript Materials to Web Platform Docs

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We’d like to highlight a pleasant spring surprise from our Microsoft colleague Eliot Graff who this week has informed the tech community that Microsoft is proving additional content to the Webplatform.org project by donating over 400 pages of JavaScript reference materials.

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and the Microsoft Internet Explorer team represented by Eliot, have been involved from the very beginning of the W3C’s Web Platform Docs (WPD), a community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for developers to help build modern web applications that will work across browsers and devices. We strongly believe this community site is key in the journey to an interoperable web platform and same markup.

From Eliot’s Blog post:

“To date, JavaScript remains one of the areas in Web Platform Docs where we are still in need of robust reference documentation. I am pleased to announce that Microsoft is donating over 400 pages worth of additional content to Web Platform Docs, in order to boost our library in this regard.”

So what does this mean for you, the developer?

You will save time and resources, knowing you can consult confidently with a community-curated site to learn about standards, innovations and best practices including:

  • What technologies really interoperate across platforms and devices;
  • The standardization status of each technology specification;
  • The stability and implementation status of specific features in actual browsers.

Microsoft's involvement in the Web Platform Docs project dates back to its inception almost two years ago. Ten supporting steward organizations (the W3C, Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera) have pooled their resources in order to create a single, centralized, nonpartisan, accurate, complete, and comprehensive collection of educational and reference materials for web development.

We trust this additional contribution from Microsoft will strengthen the existing foundation to the JavaScript reference materials.

WPD is a community effort. Anyone can join or contribute. The infrastructure is set up using an instance of MediaWiki, the same as Wikipedia. You can visit the site at www.webplatform.org and watch an overview video. From there, check out the docs or the community content. You can also join the effort and start editing, writing, and contributing in other ways. You can add a little code sample, write a tutorial, or join in for some of the organized doc sprints or other activities.

Begin simplifying your web development and check out W3C’s Web Platform Docs today. Better still, sign up for an account, find a topic of interest, and contribute your expertise!