State of the docs, November 23, 2011

This is the second in a series of posts about new or recently improved content or infrastructure on MDN. This post was slightly delayed by the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday (apologies).

Web standards docs

New pages!

As the result of a discussion on the mozilla.dev.platform forum, Boris Zbarsky wrote an article on Writing forward-compatible websites, with contributions by Henri Sivonen and others. Discussion of and improvements to this article are ongoing.

Jeremie Patonnier created pages for several SVG DOM interfaces:

Masayuki created pages for DOM CompositionEvent and various specific composition events.

David Bruant created a page for event.stopImmediatePropagation and wrote an article on Historical artifacts to avoid.

Help wanted!

It would be helpful to have an article about the Web standardization process, what the different spec draft levels are, and how web developers can decide when a new technology is stable enough to use and deploy. It could go under Web standards, which currently has some dated articles from the early days of Firefox.

Other doc updates

David Bruant expanded and added examples to DOM NodeList and the Javascript var statement.

Our friends at Google were busy, holding their own mini-docsprint:

Mozilla project docs

The Mozilla coding style guidelines were updated by Jeff Walden, Benjamin Smedberg, and others.

MND infrastructure

Version 1.6 of MDN was launched. Luke Crouch blogged about the changes in 1.6.

Eric Shepherd created new templates to guide readers who visit non-existant pages by following auto-generated links. This should alleviate the problem of non-logged-in readers being bounced to the front page in such cases. If you’re curious about the details, see his blog.

About Janet Swisher

Janet is the Community Lead and Project Manager for MDN Web Docs. She joined Mozilla in 2010, and has been involved in open source software since 2004 and in technical communication since the 20th century. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and a standard poodle.

More articles by Janet Swisher…