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!