Three(-way) cheers for the MDN doc sprint

Over the last three days, a group of Mozillians gathered in Cincinnati to eat N-way chili (and other cheese-laden dishes) and improve the MDN Documentation Center. This gathering was double the size of the first in-person doc sprint last October. The sprint followed after the Open Help conference, and shared time, space, food, and fun with members of the Gnome documentation team, who were also sprinting.

June 2011 doc sprinters

Here is an almost-certainly-incomplete list of the accomplishments from this sprint:

  • David Bruant finished the pages on JavaScript this and WeakMap, and improved several other articles on global objects.
  • Anastasia Cheetham and Colin Clark from the Inclusive Design Research Centre continued updating and migrating accessibility content from CodeTalks.org. Anastasia created articles on Accessible dynamic content and Accessible forms, and Colin started an FAQ on Web applications and ARIA. During the sprint, Colin also gave the group an eye-opening (no pun intended) demo of the NVDA open source screen reader, accessing the MDN front page, and github. I was pleased that MDN did pretty well, but Colin also provided some feedback for the development team.
  • Trevor Hobson added interface changes to the Firefox N for Developers pages, added a bunch of new interface pages, and improved some of the inline templates.
  • Kevin Lim from Google cleaned up or updated a bunch of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript pages.
  • Daniel Lopretto reviewed and improved a number of the JavaScript Guide sections and the document.cookie article, added an example on how to create custom error types.
  • Ms2ger (participating remotely!) edited the JavaScript technologies overview that David Bruant wrote earlier this year.
  • Jeremie Patonnier (participating remotely!) added DOM reference articles for SVG Rect, Circle, Line, Polyline, and Polygon, and cleaned up the DOM reference page and other pages.
  • Florian Scholz reviewed all the HTML element pages to ensure that they have consistent compatibility tables, restructured the CSS Reference page, and created a template for attributing content from sources outside MDN.
  • Tom Schuster added JavaScript Version and ECMAScript Edition to all important methods and properties, migrated compatibility information from Kangax, and updated many code examples.
  • Christian Sonne wrote a template that aggregates compatibility data from multiple pages into one giant table (such as for all HTML elements). Once the bugs are shaken out, we’ll start using this in several areas. He also wrote an article on animation-fill-mode and updated several related pages, improved the consistency of quite a few templates and compatibility tables, and wrote a live example for the <progress> element.
  • Manuel Strehl proofread the SVG tutorial, added a tutorial section on SVG fonts, and added SVG element articles for font, font-*, and filters.
  • Janet Swisher updated or clarified several meta-project pages, such as the formatting guide and the Writer’s Guide; edited and added a solution for the JavaScript topic of the CSS tutorial.

Many thanks to all the sprinters for your time and hard work, and also to Shaun McCance for organizing the Open Help conference and local arrangements for the sprint.


2 comments

  1. Dane Foster

    There is no direct link from any of the top level pages to the Accessibility content. At a minimum Accessibility should be one of the bullets in the “Key Topics for Web Developers” subsection on the docs page.

    June 10th, 2011 at 12:03

  2. Michael Feasey

    We have been using Firefox with great success. However, of late Bookmarks do not work. When we hit Bookmarks nothing happens. Although we can delete Firefox we can see no way of down loading a new Firefox that dose work. What to do.

    PS. Netsape works fine, in all respects.

    June 11th, 2011 at 17:07

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