For the past three days, a small group of Mozillians met in Paris and, instead of enjoying the beautiful warm weather, insanely stayed inside and wrote documentation on web standards for the Mozilla Developer Network. We worked in the Mozilla Paris office on Saturday and Sunday, and then on Monday moved to La Cantine, around the corner, so the staff could use the office. We also enjoyed some long, relaxed French lunches and dinners and saw a bit of the city, but mostly we wrote docs.

Here’s what we accomplished:

• David Bruant
  • expanded, updated, and enhanced JavaScript strict mode;
  • expanded and added examples to Object.defineProperty;
  • added a section on Enumerating all properties of an object to the topic on working with JavaScript objects;
  • reviewed and corrected Object method topics.
• Sebastian Perez Vasseur
  • wrote Introducing the Audio API extension, Visualizing Audio Spectrum, Creating a Web based tone generator, and Displaying the Mozilla logo with the Audio Samples;
  • wrote SVG animation with SMIL;
  • documented NotifyAudioAvailableEvent;
  • created a thematic classification for HTML5 topics;
  • created a banner for HTML5 topics, and added it to appropriate pages;
  • added Mozilla-specific properties to HTMLMediaElement;
• Florian Scholz (aka Elchi3)
  • documented 21 out of 30 MathML elements;
  • restructured the SVG element reference.
• Jean-Yves Perrier (aka teoli)
  • wrote an introduction to HTTP;
  • created a page to collect topics on HTTP headers;
  • created a page for HTTP response codes;
  • started documenting HTML5 constraint validation.
• Eric Shepherd (aka Sheppy)
  • wrote CSP overview, Introducing Content Security Policy, Using Content Security Policy, Default CSP restrictions, CSP policy directives, and Using CSP violation reports;
  • created scripts to generate tables-of-contents both alphabetically and by-category automatically;
  • documented -moz-image-rect and -moz-calc;
  • improved topics on CSS transitions and -moz-transition based on feedback from David Baron;
  • cleaned up Firefox 4 for developers.
• Janet Swisher
  • edited CSS Getting started tutorial, part I, and added solutions to the exercises and links to properties in the CSS Reference;
  • wrote this blog post, which is documentation of the sprint :-)
• Paul Rouget was a fantastic “localhost” and technical reviewer. Expect to see more awesome stuff from him in the coming days and weeks.

It takes a special kind of person to set aside a weekend when they could be having other kinds of fun or maintaining a personal life, to devote to writing technical documentation. The documentation that was written this weekend moves MDN further towards the goal of being a comprehensive, usable, and accurate resource for everyone developing for the Open Web. Many thanks once again to the volunteer contributors, as well as to the Mozilla Paris staff who welcomed us and facilitated our visit.

For a final taste of life in France, we will now attempt to travel during a French transit strike.