MDN Articles

At Mozilla we’ve been talking recently about how important the web has become to everything around us. The web – and the Internet it’s built on – has become the defining computing platform for this century. And most of that has happened because of web developers, and the freedom they have enjoyed.

Firefox is one of the most important tools for web developers. Firebug combined with Firefox’s strong support for standards means that most web developers are building for Firefox first and then porting to other browsers later.

But even with developers using Firefox for development there hasn’t been an easy way for those of us at the Mozilla project to let you know about what’s going on at Mozilla – what we’re putting in Firefox, what we’re doing to bring the web forward and what we’re doing for web developers. (Although the hacks weblog is the first attempt at that.) And conversely there isn’t an obvious way for individual web developers to give Mozilla structured feedback about what’s important to them or what issues they might be having.

That’s why we’re working on the Mozilla Developer Network. It will serve two purposes:

1. To provide you with information about what’s going on at Mozilla and around the web.
2. To give you the chance to give us structured feedback and become part of the Mozilla Community.

Our first step is to do a quick survey. If we can get 5,000 responses to the survey, we’ll release the aggregate results.

The survey itself asks you about how you work, what you think of Firefox and should only take a few minutes to complete.

Thanks! We’ll have more on the Mozilla Developer Network as things progress.

As you may have noticed, Hacks looks a bit different today.  That’s because we’ve completely redesigned the site. We wanted to make it easier for everyone to not only enjoy the new content we publish, but also to find past articles and demos. With Firefox 3.6 just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to rediscover Hacks!

Thanks go out to Chris Howse for his design expertise, Craig Cook and Matt Harris for their development work, and everyone else that helped out.  What a difference a redesign like this can make:

Hacks v1.0

Chris Blizzard started the Hacks blog back in June 2009 as part of the “35 days of Firefox” campaign to give developers a look at the latest features and web technology upgrades that were coming in Firefox 3.5.  Since then, we have continued to reach out to web developers and collaborate with them to put together amazing posts.

With a collection of helpful tutorials, updates on web standards, and technology demos, Hacks has become a popular destination for anyone interested in keeping up with innovation on the web.  We cover a wide range of topics, including everything from new possibilities with HTML5 to the latest version of Firebug. Developers get to see what is possible on the web today, while everyone gets a glimpse of what the future holds for Firefox and the open web.

Hacks has ignited a renewed focus on web developer outreach and collaboration. In addition to the blog, you can follow us on Twitter, watch videos and demos on YouTube, and even subscribe to the about:hacks newsletter. Our goal is to inform and inspire web developers to help us establish a strong Mozilla Developer Network (MDN).

We have big plans for MDN in 2010, and Hacks v2.0 is just the beginning!  Enjoy the new website and please share your thoughts and feedback with us…

Happy New Year!

Starting from June, Mozilla runs a monthly competition to showcase newest web technologies. In an international competition individuals can submit demos that show the world just how much is possible using open and free technologies in a modern browser.

The Mozilla Dev Derby happens every month and revolves around a certain technology. A panel of judges will pick the winners and give out prizes including awesome laptop bags, Android phones and exclusive MDN T-Shirts. Above all, however, you can see your name pimped by Mozilla on here, on the Derby site and we will do short interviews with all the winners.

Many companies spend a lot of time and effort to create showcase demos to promote their browser, development environment or platform. Whilst this is great we think it makes for a much better learning experience to concentrate on one technology at a time and build smaller, more focused and better documented demos. This is why we want you to be in the driver seat and show us what you can do. There is no better way to learn a new technology than by playing with it.

The rules of the Mozilla Dev Derby are simple:

• Your demo must work in a current version of Firefox, Firefox Beta or Firefox Aurora, without requiring plug-ins.
• You must include all source code, including for any binary components.
• The description of the entry must be clear and accurate.
• The demo must be mainly your own work, and must not include unauthorized intellectual property of someone else.
• The name of your entry must not include any Mozilla trademarks.
• The entry must use open web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and standard JavaScript APIs
• Libraries and modules that are freely available are allowed; proprietary ones are not.

To start off we chose CSS3 Animations as the first challenge. Use CSS to animate page content and create movie-style intros (remember the AT-AT walker demo?) and show us how designers can animate without the need for plugins or scripting knowledge. NOTE: Firefox 5 will introduce support for CSS3 Animations. You should use the Firefox Beta or Aurora channel for this Dev Derby. Your demo will not work in Firefox 4. ;-)

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines and head over to the Mozilla Dev Derby site.

Two weeks ago we announced the launch of the Mozilla Developer Network. We also asked for your help through this short survey for Web developers. The questions were meant to understand who you are, what you’re interested in, and what resources would be most useful to you on MDN. We’re happy to report that we have received over 3,600 responses so far, so thank you!

Here’s a Sneak Peek at the Data:

HTML/CSS/Javascript are the winning combination, PHP is a close 4th. After that, technology choices are quite fragmented.

The most popular tools for development are a collection of Firefox add-ons, including Firebug and Web developer, and… text editors! Each developer has a favorite, from vi or emacs to TextMate or Notepad++.

Either Web developers live mostly in the US and in France, or this is where the most active Mozilla developer outreach is happening. We think it’s the latter, for France we call it the “Paul and Tristan effect”!

What Are We Missing?

Please help us get more responses from around the world so we can understand the needs of Web developers everywhere.

We would also love to get more participants who are working in corporate environments, especially on intranets. And we’d like to hear more from those of you who are working (willingly or not) with proprietary technologies.

How Can You Help?

We’d like to get 5,000 responses before we close the survey, so help us spread the word to other Web developers: tweet about it and send the survey link to your friends!

Once we have enough responses, we’ll publish the results on this blog. You can also follow the latest Mozilla Developer Network updates on Twitter at @mozhacks.

Update 2012-07-06: The date when content editing switches to the new platform has been postponed to July 9th. There have been some stability and data center issues that slowed us down, as well as a few big bugs that have been resolved but still need to be tested.

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Hopefully by now you’re aware we’re switching to a brand new, Mozilla-built wiki platform for the Mozilla Developer Network. The new site will launch in mid-July, and we’re incredibly excited about it!

As part of the launch process, we’re going to begin directing all editing of content to the new wiki starting on July 5th. That means any time someone tries to edit a page, they will actually go to the new site and edit that instead. No editing of the current, MindTouch powered site will be possible from that time on.

The current site will remain in place for the time being, and viewers will see that rather than the updated content. However, each page will include a banner explaining the situation and offering a link to the equivalent page on the new wiki, for people that want to view the very latest content.

On the weekend of July 7-8, we plan to have a very structured test program, led by Mozilla’s brilliant QA team. We will be inviting community members to participate actively, to help ensure that the new site is ready for action.

We continue to expect to launch the new site on or around July 15th, directing all traffic there.

Watch this space for further announcements. We’re getting close now, and we’ll need your help to get there!

Ever wonder which industries have the most web developers? Do you know how many people develop for the web on Linux? Are there more web designers out there than web developers? Where do web developers hang out and what do they think of the resources out there today? Which JavaScript library is the most popular? How many developers use Google Code or visit the MDN for documentation?

We wanted to get answers to those questions and more… so we reached out to our community and beyond. We ended up with a snapshot of the web developers out there to better guide our plans for the Mozilla Developer Network. While we know a lot about Mozilla hackers, add-on developers, and those working on mobile, we wanted to learn more about web developers, who are by far the largest segment that we touch. And while there is data available about their demographics and the technologies they use, we couldn’t find anything that would give us a better understanding of where they hang out and what they think of the companies that are working on the products and technologies they build and use.

We looked at the breakdown of web developers, and of the websites and resources they rely on. We will use the results to improve our documentation on the MDN Doc Center and continue to better engage with web developers. As more mobile app developers adopt the web platform for apps and games we want to encourage web developers to push the limits of web applications. Our demos will showcase what the latest HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript innovations. We want to use this survey to know what Mozilla can do to help web developers support the open web.

I’ll summarize the results from the 1,331 responses we received from our “Web Developers & the Open Web 2010” (WDATOW 2010) survey, and share the infographic we created to capture some of the key findings.

The Infographic

Our Sample

We reached the greatest number of respondents via our Hacks blog and @mozhacks Twitter account, but we were also able to tap into our global community through our localizers, who helped translate the survey into 9 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Indonesian. We also posted requests for responses to various developer forums and websites affiliated with other companies, to ensure we had a broad sample that was as representative as possible. Of course we didn’t get as many responses from some of those channels, so the results should be interpreted with the caveat that active Mozilla community members are likely overrepresented.

However, that does not take away from the value of the information we have gathered. We identified “Mozilla” developers and “Other” developers based on answers to a few questions and found that the cross-over profiles of both categories of people were very similar. You can find out more on page 11 in the full report. We identified both categories based on the overall feedback on Mozilla sites vs other company sites, as well as how often they visited those sites, with those that primarily visited MDN making up the “Mozilla” developers, and those that did not being labeled “Other”. Therefore, while some of the open-ended questions might have a lot of subjective and fairly biased opinions, most of the questions produced fairly consistent responses from both groups when it came to the technologies and resources.

We had a very diverse set of respondents that spans the entire globe. While most other research has large US samples, with only a few other countries represented, for our survey, only 20% of the respondents were in the US. Given the high response rate from Europe, we ended up with a well-balanced international sample. That’s why some of our results may not look like web developer profiles that you have seen elsewhere. And that’s a good thing: we are providing another data point for comparison and further analysis.

Web Developer Profiles

We started the survey with some basic questions that would allow us to segment the developers taking the survey. One interesting finding that didn’t seem to match other research we had looked at was the primary OS used by developers. While we would expect most web developers to be on Mac OS X, followed by Windows and a small percentage on Linux (like in the Web Directions survey), we had a more evenly distributed breakdown. Recent Windows versions combined made up 46%, followed by a strong showing of Linux users at 30%, and Mac OS X with a 24% developer base. I would say that a strong bias towards open source in the sample combined with the fact that we had a lot of responses from outside the US are the reasons for Linux being more popular. Also, while a lot of people self-selected as both a web developer and designer, the sample definitely skews towards web developers, so perhaps that explains the Mac OS X numbers.

It was also interesting to see the years of experience spread out across veterans and newbies, with about 48% of the sample having less than 5 years of experience and 52% having 6 or more years in web development.

For our “What type of a web developer/designer are you?” question, respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer, so it’s not surprising to see that a lot of people work on many aspects of web development. However, it was clear that most of them were in one (or both) of two categories: 89% front-end developers and 75% back-end developers. There were more web architects than I expected at 41%, and designers made up a sizable chunk, at 39% of the sample. And although only 15% of those surveyed selected “Add-on developer”, we expect that number to go up as more web developers start to create Firefox extensions with Add-on Builder, using JavaScript rather than heavier-weight programming languages.

There were no surprises from the industries question, with most web developers working in technology at 38%, followed by media at 18%. And while there were smaller percentages working in other industries, 11% of those surveyed were students who have not yet entered the work force. For more on developer profiles see the full report.

Where Developers Spend Time

Perhaps the most important series of questions in this survey focused on the web resources and communities that developers rely on for their day-to-day work. Whether it was for looking up documentation or asking questions to debug their code, we wanted to get an idea of the most popular websites for web developers.

We picked a list of websites based on initial feedback from web developers during the survey design process, and the results clearly show that all of them are popular and engender a lot of opinions on aspects of those sites.

We not only asked which resource and community was the respondent’s favorite, but also provided a list of attributes for them to rate. PHP.net was the most popular resource at 32%, followed by jQuery.com and w3schools. And Stack Overflow was by far the most popular developer community at 40%, followed by GitHub and Wikipedia.

We intentionally included a diverse set of websites in order to see how developers rated them on our list of criteria. Since MDN supports both resources and communities, we wanted to get data on a broad set of sites. Be sure to take a close look at the ratings to see how all the websites did across a number of important attributes. You can find them starting on page 20 of the full report.

We were looking for a way to find out what works across a variety of site characteristics. For example, our Hacks blog is mostly posts about web technology, the MDN Doc Center is all about documentation, and our various programs and campaigns via Mobile, Add-ons, and Labs provide a more interactive forum for developers to get involved. Based on the ratings and open-ended feedback, we have learned a lot about which existing sites do well in terms of effectiveness, documentation, navigation, aesthetics, etc.

All of this information is valuable for us as we evaluate and prioritize projects that will help us grow and improve our MDN community.

Web Technologies

We also wanted to gauge which technologies developers are using right now. It was no surprise that the web standards trio of HTML, CSS and JavaScript remain the primary set of technologies for most web developers, with usage at over 95% for all three. PHP was also notably still the most popular programming language at 80%, with Python a distant second at 24%, followed by Flash at 22%. To see the complete breakdown of technologies used, as well as what developers identified as “open technologies”, see page 16 in the full report.

Within JavaScript, jQuery remains the most popular library at 82%. Prototype was used by 16% of the respondents, with Mootools next at 12%, and Yahoo’s YUI coming in at 10%. With so many JS libraries to choose from, we expect that those numbers will continue to shift.

We also asked which next-generation technologies were interesting to our respondents, and found out that HTML5 video, canvas, and SVG were all important to developers. 3D using WebGL seemed less interesting to them, but that might be due to the technology being not yet ready for prime time and the lack of examples in the wild. We hope to change that with the capabilities in Firefox 4 and beyond.

Company Affiliated Websites

Although all of the sites in this category serve different purposes and have varying feature sets, it was still important to get a feel for where developers were spending their time and how they viewed the developer sites from companies like Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Oracle, and Sun.

Given our sample, we expected most developers to have heard of and frequently visited Google’s and Mozilla’s sites. The data clearly shows both as popular destinations for web developers. But it’s important to note that these two sites offer different benefits to developers. Google Code is a great open source code repository and community, while the MDN website remains a very popular web documentation resource.

The other sites are mostly focused on promoting and supporting the company’s products and technologies, so it wasn’t surprising to see that many of our respondents had never, or rarely, visited them. Again, given our audience, we expected to see this and it was nice to confirm our assumptions.

What’s next?

Our survey report, as well as the high-level data reflected in our infographic, give us a snapshot of the web developers we serve through our MDN website and programs. With the insights from this survey, we now know where in the world our audience is, where they go for information and help, and what they think about the companies that help define the web.

A few key areas we need to work on right now are localization, documentation, and developer tools. From the knowledge we have gained, we now have data to back up some of the assumptions we have made to date, the details we need to refine our MDN roadmap, and user feedback to guide our developer engagement efforts from a marketing and communications stand point.

As we kick off the new MDN docs platform project, build out a demo gallery to showcase the latest in HTML5 and CSS3 the web has to offer, and continue to find ways to connect with the web developers that visit us every day, this survey and future developer research will continue to guide us.

Thanks to everyone who participated and we hope that you find the infographic interesting. We tried to capture the major findings in a way that would allow anyone to quickly get a sense of what the web developer community looks like today. If you’re interested in seeing the full report, it is available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39278543/Web-Developers-the-Open-Web-Survey-Results.

Thanks!
- Jay & the MDN team

UPDATE: I apologize for anyone that had problems viewing the full report on scribd.com. I did not realize you needed an account to view public slides. The report is now available for download in .pdf, .odp, and .pptx formats.

Documenting the open Web and Web standards is a big job! As Mozillians, we’re well aware of this — documenting the open Web has been the mission of the Mozilla Developer Network for many years. Anything we can do to further the cause of a free and open Web is a worthwhile endeavor. With so many different groups involved in the design and development of new Web standards, it can be tricky to figure out the current right way to use them. That’s why we’re excited to be able to share this news with you.

Introducing Web Platform Docs

Mozilla, along with a group of major Web-related organizations convened by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has announced the start of Web Platform Docs (WPD), a new documentation site for Web standards documentation, which will be openly-licensed and community-maintained. The supporting organizations, known as the “stewards,” have contributed an initial batch of content to the site from their existing resources. The body of content is very much in an alpha state, as there is much work to be done to integrate, improve, and augment that content. to achieve the vision of WPD as a comprehensive and authoritative source for Web developer documentation. The stewards want to open the site for community participation as early as possible. With your help, WPD can achieve its vision being a comprehensive and authoritative source for Web developer documentation.

Web Platform Docs has a similar goal to MDN: to help web developers improve their ability to make sites and applications using web standards. Mozilla welcomes this effort and joins with the other stewards in financially supporting the Web Platform Docs project, and in providing seed content for it. This new project is very much aligned with Mozilla’s mission to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web.

What does this mean for MDN?

MDN already provides a wealth of information for Web developers and for developers who use or contribute to Mozilla technology. That isn’t going to change. Some members of the MDN community, including both paid staff and volunteers, are actively involved with the Web Platform Docs project. Web Platform Docs incorporates some seed content from MDN, namely tutorial and guide content. Anyone is welcome to use MDN content under its Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), whether on WPD or elsewhere.

Licensing issues

Licensing is where things get a little bit complicated. MDN and WPD use different contributor agreements and different licenses for reuse. By default, WPD contributors grant W3C the ability to relicense their original content under an open license (Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)). MDN content is licensed by the contributors under CC-BY-SA. The copyright belongs to the contributors, not to Mozilla, so we don’t have the right to change the license. Therefore, content that originates from MDN must be specially marked and attributed when it appears on WPD. If you create an account on WPD and create a new page, you’ll see that there is an option to indicate that the content you’re contributing came from MDN, and to provide the original URL on MDN. If you do copy MDN content (and we would be happy if you did so), we ask that you comply with the license requirements. There is also a way on WPD to mark sections of articles as coming from MDN, for cases where they get merged into CC-BY content.

Get involved

We encourage all Mozillians to visit the Web Platform Docs site, take a look, and get involved. By working with the other stewards to jointly build a complete, concise, and accurate suite of documentation of and for Web standards, we can help make the future of the World Wide Web brighter than ever!

We have been asked a number of questions since the launch of Web Platforms Docs (WPD) about how it aligns with the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). Questions such as how content will be shared between the two, how changes will be tracked, who will do the work to port content, and which site people should contribute to. To try and help answer some of these questions, we’ve put together this short FAQ.

Before we dive into these, it’s worth underscoring that Mozilla sees MDN and WPD complementing each other. While WPD is just starting out on its journey to become an invaluable resource for developers, MDN is fully mature and will continue to serve needs that WPD doesn’t. We also want to take this opportunity to remind people that Mozilla is community driven, so any decisions to change what we’re doing will be based on community feedback.

Here are the top questions we’re getting on the introduction of WPD. If you have additional questions, post a comment or email jswisher (at) mozilla (dot) com.

MDN and WPD seem to have similar goals. How are they different?

Mozilla supports WPD because it fits with Mozilla’s mission to promote openness and innovation on the Web. WPD has the benefit of financial support, content contributions, and perspectives from multiple browser vendors and Web-oriented companies. MDN has a long history of supporting developers of many stripes: Web developers, developers who use Mozilla code, and developers who work on Mozilla code. MDN promotes Mozilla’s mission by serving all these audiences.

One difference is in the default licenses for reuse of the content from the two sites, although they are both Creative Commons licenses. MDN uses a CC-BY-SA license, which ensures that reused content will always be published in the context of an openly licensed work. WPD uses a CC-BY license, which enables the content to be reused as widely as possible, including potentially in the context of otherwise proprietary works.

Why support two similar sites? Isn’t there a lot of topical overlap?

WPD is in its infancy, and will take time to gather momentum, soothe teething problems, and foster a community, which Mozilla and other WPD stewards will help to do. Meanwhile MDN needs to support the hundreds of thousands of developers who visit it every week.

As WPD matures, the MDN community will evaluate if and when it makes sense to defer to it on particular topics. In an ideal future, WPD would become the authoritative resource on Web standards, with a large volunteer community and community-based governance, while MDN could focus on Mozilla’s vision and its open source products that implement those standards. But it will take some time to get there.

WPD launched its site as a “minimum viable product”, providing just enough features to get started. This is a prudent and reasonable strategy, so that feedback can help determine how the site is developed. However, it means that WPD is currently lacking desirable features that will be added later. Key among these missing features is support for translating articles into other languages, to help Web developers whose native language is not English.

Meanwhile, due to its long head start as a Web resource, MDN offers translations in multiple languages, which are created by global communities of volunteer localizers, who prioritize translation of topics based on local needs and interests. As with English content, the localization communities will evaluate whether and when it makes sense to defer to content on WPD.

Can MDN content be copied to WPD? Who is going to do the work of porting MDN content to WPD?

Anyone working on articles on a given topic on WPD is more than welcome to incorporate content from MDN, as it makes sense to do so. Rather than exporting MDN content into WPD, wholesale, we hope that it will be curated by WPD authors into the appropriate context on the new site.

Please be sure to following the licensing and attributing guidelines for MDN content on WebPlatform.org. This is needed because of the different licenses for the sites’ content; MDN content on WPD must be delineated and attributed, to ensure proper credit to MDN authors, and to convey the share-alike license requirement.

Will duplicated content in both sites be automatically kept in sync?

There’s no technical solution to do this at this time. We expect that each site’s content will evolve independently.

Doesn’t that mean that there will be redundant work to keep both of them updated, especially as browsers and standards progress?

Yes, unfortunately. There may eventually be areas where the sites can share information, such as browser compatibility data.[1] That has yet to be worked out.

Are the stewards just turning WPD over to “the community” or are they devoting staff to it?

Mozilla has paid staff participating in the WPD community in addition to working on MDN. Chris Mills of Opera is spending half of his time as a W3C Fellow, with a focus on WPD. Other stewards, as well as W3C, also have staff working on WPD; you’d have to ask them about their time allocation. However, contributions from Web developers, writers, educators, and others who are not paid staff of stewards are essential to the long-term success of WPD (as well as that of MDN). If only steward-paid staff contribute, it will not achieve its vision to be a truly open community resource.

I want to contribute to Web standards documentation. Should I contribute to MDN or to WPD?

Both sites could use your help, and Mozilla is contributing to both sites. MDN has an established community and lots of open documentation for the Web, which always needs improving, expanding, and translating. We will continue to build that community and give them a place to learn and share knowledge about the Web. WPD’s community is still forming, and could use your input into basic issues like information architecture and the translation scheme. WPD aims to bring together tutorials and materials from many different organizations, as well as contributions from Web developers, and we believe that will also support the open Web. Check them both out. Meet the communities. Join in where you feel comfortable.

Here are some channels for getting involved:

	Mozilla Developer Network	Web Platform Docs
Introduction to contributing	Getting started	Getting Started Guide
Mailing list	dev-mdc@lists.mozilla.org	public-webplatform@w3.org
IRC channel	#devmo on irc.mozilla.org	#webplatform on irc.freenode.org

[1] Specifically, MDN has lots of manually collected cross-browser compatibility data, which WPD can use now; WPD is looking at ways to automate collecting such data, which MDN could then also use.

As I mentioned in my post about ways you can help improve MDN in 2011, we are holding a virtual sprint to write documentation on MDN next week, January 28 to 29.

“Virtual” means that there will not be an in-person meeting, but rather people will participate from wherever they are, discussing what we’re doing via IRC. Please join us for any portion of the scheduled 34 hours of sprint time. If you’re not sure what to work on, just ask (either before or during the sprint), and we can help you find something appropriate to your background and interests.

Check out the doc sprint planning page for more details. Add your name under “Who” if you think you might help out.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with IRC, it’s a real-time text chat protocol that Mozilla uses a lot. If you don’t have a favorite IRC client program, you can use the ChatZilla add-on for Firefox, or the MiBBit website. Specify the server as irc.mozilla.org on port 6697 using SSL, pick a nickname, and connect to the #devmo channel. (If you’re having trouble with all that, you can use the mozilla.dev.mdc Google group to ask for help. Sorry about the spam in there, but I will see and respond if you post.)

Oh, and did I mention the t-shirts?

Make a non-trivial contribution during the sprint, and send me your size and mailing address, and I will make sure you get a t-shirt featuring the MDN robot-dino. (Your personal info will be handled according to the Mozilla privacy policy. I promise not to show up at your door demanding more documentation.)

This week, Mozilla unveiled the newly redesigned Mozilla Developer Network, the latest incarnation of MDC. The website has evolved over the years and we recently decided to change the name from Mozilla Developer Center to the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) to better reflect the developer segments that make up our community and provide a better platform for engaging developers in the Mozilla mission and our plans for pushing the open Web forward. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some of the new features and content, in addition to some of the things you can expect in the months to come.

Our Mission
Upon first glance, the most obvious change is that the website has undergone a radical overhaul: from top to bottom, the entire MDN looks different. Even the tagline underneath the title is new: the Mozilla Developer Network is “a comprehensive, usable, and accurate resource for everyone developing for the Open Web.”

The idea behind the tagline is perhaps the biggest change we’ve made to the MDN: we wanted to create a place where all web developers – not just people who develop using Mozilla technologies – can find the resources they need to make the Internet at-large a better place. This fundamental premise drove many of the design decisions incorporated into the new MDN.

The New Home Page
One of our main goals for this redesign was to streamline and simplify the process of finding information. Because the MDN home page is the first page most people will see when they visit the MDN, we wanted to make sure a diverse set of users could access as much information as possible without cluttering the page.

Throughout the page, there are several opportunities for the user to sign up for an MDN account; if you already have an MDC/Deki account there’s no need to sign up again. If you’re new to MDN, you can easily register to join our community. Members will be able to log in to both the Developer Forums and the Docs Wiki.

The page also features a promo box with revolving panes highlighting important open Web technologies and tools. The goal of the promo box is to direct developers to the pages about technologies that are most likely to be pertinent to their work, which helps reduce the number of steps it takes to reach a desired article. There are a lot of things happening at Mozilla that developers will care about, so this is where we hope to provide every visitor a chance to learn more about those topics.

Moreover, the main content of the page will be available through a tabbed interface that will allow users to click through to whichever section in which they are interested. We currently have Docs and News but have plans to add Tools and Events as well. There are plans for the sidebar as well, but for now we have provided a live Twitter feed so that users can get a feel for what various Mozilla communities are talking about and sharing. We will eventually add trending topics based on activity from around the MDN, streams for conversations in the forums, and the latest web technology demos and experiments.

Site Architecture
The new MDN header contains a search bar and click-through access to various sections through the primary navigation. The MDN’s content has been separated into four main categories, each of which has its own navigation item: Web, Mobile, Add-ons, and Applications. This segmentation of the navigation allows us to organize content into non-overlapping buckets, which should more precisely direct developers to the content they need. Then we have the universal Docs – which takes users to a landing page leading to various articles and content from the Docs Wiki – and Community – which takes users to the Developer Forums for now – navigation items. Since those two areas are applicable to all developer segments, we kept them separate in the navigation layout.

Each content page has a similar format: we feature a few popular articles for each category, some Mozilla-supplied tools, related news and updates, and a feed with relevant tweets. At the bottom of each page, there will eventually be popular forum topics and community comments. (Only the Add-ons page has this content right now). If you don’t find what you’re looking for on the landing page for any given category, there are links in each section of the page that take you to more options and pages. Despite the design overhaul, all of the information from the previous MDC remains intact, so there’s no need to worry about losing important articles. It’s all there and works exactly the same way as before.

Also, any information that can be accessed via the Docs landing page can also be accessed from other pages on the MDN, but we wanted to provide an alternative way of presenting the information: we highlight some important web development topics, in addition to important topics from the other categories. There are also fun features like Doc of the Day and Most Active Docs, in case you’re interested in what everyone else is looking at.

Growing the Community
The final navigation item in the header is for Community and perhaps the most important addition to the new MDN: Developer Forums. In the previous version of the MDN, although there was plenty of documentation to be found, we didn’t provide developers much of an opportunity to talk, discuss, and ask questions. We felt that, in our goal to make the MDN a central hub for web developers, forums comprised an important feature to incorporate into the new version.

Right now, there are five broad topics for discussion: Open Web, Mozilla Platform, MDN Community, Mozilla Add-ons, and Mozilla Labs. These domains should be able to cover much of the wide gamut of available discussion topics, but if not, we can always add new ones. Because the forums are new, they are still in the experimental stage; if you have any feedback for us, just use the feedback link at the bottom of the page. Feel free to start new threads and ask questions about anything, especially if it’s about documentation or the open web in general.

We’d love for you to try out the new forums! Again, if you have an account for MDC/Deki, you can use that to log in; if not, you can use the link in the upper-right corner to become an MDN member.

Submitting Feedback
At the bottom of every page, there’s a link to submit feedback on the new MDN pages. Whether there’s something wrong or there’s something you’d like to see (or whether you’d just like to say hello!), just hit that link and let us know what’s on your mind. We’ll do what we can to integrate your ideas to make the Mozilla Developer Network a better place for all developers.

Next Steps
Though we have made quite a few changes to the Mozilla Developer Network, they certainly are not the last. As the MDN continues to expand, we have decided to create a next-generation Docs platform that the Mozilla web development team will be building on Django, similar to the one being implemented for the new SUMO site. Planning is already underway, and we hope to migrate documentation over sometime in 2011.

Once we’ve converted all the content over, we plan to improve the way you find information via the search bar. So far, we have been devising ways to improve the tagging system and make sure that localized versions of articles are released as soon as possible. In addition, with the help of article rating and commenting systems, we can help make sure that the most relevant and accurate results are mentioned at the top of each search query. And finally, we are building a system that allows community experts in particular fields to regulate editing and writing of articles in their domains.

We’re also looking to expand the Community tab. Though we expect the forums to remain the centerpiece of that section of the site, we hope to also bring you news, updates, and other community-sourced content.

We hope that this has helped you get acquainted with the new Mozilla Developer Network. As always, we are amenable to your feedback and ideas, as we are as eager as you are to make the MDN an even better place for web developers to write, read, and discuss important Web topics. We look forward to hearing from you, and we hope you like the new MDN.

Thanks!
- Jay & Brian (+ the MDN team)