Starting 2012 with loads of doc updates

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The year 2012 is off to a great start for the MDN documentation and its community. This past weekend, a bunch of community members gathered virtually for a documentation sprint to write, update, and translate docs. But already in the preceding weeks, a great deal of work had already been accomplished. This post is a recap of those efforts.

Doc sprint results

• Onur Avsar filled in lots of missing information in HTTP response codes, and improved <time> and <frame>.
• Michael Beckwith improved and updated the HTML5 & friends thematic classification, Common CSS questions, and Tips for authoring fast-loading HTML pages.
• Hans Hillen created pages for ARIA guides, ARIA techniques, ARIA technique template and the specific technique Using the alert role.
• Jeremie Patonnier improved SVG Content type and fill-rule and created pages for 7 SVG attributes.
• Rajeev Bharshetty added code examples for embedding audio in Using HTML5 audio and video, for SVG elements text, title, and g and SVG attributes class, script, r, cy, cx, and points.
• Fred Bourgeon restructured and improved CSS opacity and translated a bunch of CSS property pages into French.
• David Bruant did a major rewrite of Inheritance and the prototype chain in the JavaScript Guide, and wrote an article on HTTP cookies.
• Corey Gackenheimer added browser compatibility and an example to DeviceOrientationEvent, and moved some obsolete information from Detecting device orentation to MozOrientation.
• Trevor Hobson added the isURIVisited method to mozIAsyncHistory.
• Burak Yiğit Kaya cleaned up the pages for the instanceof operator, the bind function, window.setTimeout, and element.addEventListener.
• Filipus Klutiero clarified the difference between form.submit and a form submit button.
• Jeremie Patonnier created pages for 5 more SVG attributes and
  SVGCursorElement, and updated the SVG IRI content type.
• Jonathan Protzenko revamped the Thunderbird extensions page.
• Colby Russell wrote an article on DOM Inspector internals.
• Florian Scholz documented two more MathML elements (mlabeledtr and mglyph, created pages for the Battery API and CSS column-fill property, documented the muted and loop properties of HTMLMediaElement, and added Gecko-specific properties to HTMLVideoElement.
• Tom Schuster started a page for ECMAScript 6 in Mozilla and added window.crypto.getRandomValues.
• Marek Stępień created pages for document.head, DOMContentLoaded, and the JavaScript global object Set; documented browser variations in the return value of element.getElementsByTagName; updated several window.navigator properties to match the HTML5 spec and reality; and did a bunch of other clean-ups and updates.
• Andreas Wagner documented and wrote exmaple code for a demo add-on for Thunderbird, and created pages for nsIMsgAccount and nsIMsgIncomingServer.
• Patrick Wied created a page for SVG contentStyleType, added examples to HTMLSelectElement and SVG style attribute, and fixed up links in several pages for SVG-related DOM interfaces.
• Jonathan Wilsson added or updated browser compatibility for 3 HTML elements, 2 DOM elements, and 42 CSS properties and pseudo-classes. He also added content to :focus and :enabled.

Previous activity

Here are some of the significant changes in the weeks prior to the doc sprint.

Web standards docs

• Eric Bidelman added mobile browser compatibility info for document.querySelectorAll and document.querySelector.
• Fred Bourgeon continued what he started during Mercredi Doc by creating French translations for 9 CSS animation-related properties and two SVG attributes.
• Mattias Ekendahl created a page for cssMediaRule.
• Corey Gackenheimer added a browser compatibility table to DeviceOrientationEvent.
• Masayuki created pages for DOM input event and UIEvent, and edited a bunch of pages related to DOM events.
• Timothée Carry-Caignon added some notes to <button> (update 2012-01-24:) and translated Writing forward-compatible websites into French.
• Nickolay Ponomarev updated and improved the pages for DOM document and XMLHttpRequest.
• Florian Scholz updated CanvasRenderingContext2D and added WebKit- and Gecko-specific methods and attributes.
• Rob W added an example to Node.normalize.
• Toji added several new resources to the WebGL page.
• xkizer improved the examples and explanations in the Predefined core objects section of the JavaScript Guide.
• XP1 fixed a bunch of copyediting and style consistency issues in a whole slew of pages.

Mozilla technology docs

• Will Bamberg created a landing page and various articles for BrowserID.
• Axel Grude created pages for two dozen messaging-related XPCOM interfaces.
• Benjamin Smedberg wrote an article on Making cross-thread calls using runnables in XPCOM.

Mozilla project docs

• Jeff Beatty‘s work on the Localization Quick Start Guide is “done” — no longer marked as a draft.
• Mark Côté updated Mozilla automated testing to match current practices.
• Jeff Muizelaar wrote an article on Debugging update problems.
• Jonathan Watt updated Debugging on Mac OS X, added an Installation section to Eclipse , and signficantly updated and rewrote Eclipse CDT and Using NetBeans with Mozilla.
• Jared Wein wrote articles on Getting started with contributing patches to the Firefox preferences and Requesting feedback and ui-review for desktop Firefox front-end changes.