MDN Web Docs

Last updated

MDN Web Docs
MDN Web Docs logo.svg
Native name
Mozilla Developer Network
FormerlyMozilla Developer Center
Type of site
 Wiki
Available in
  • English
  • Chinese
  • French
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Spanish
Owner Mozilla
Industryopen-source software development
URL developer.mozilla.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, required to edit content
Users over 45.000 [1]
Launched2005;19 years ago (2005)
Current statusOnline
Content license
 CC BY-SA v2.5+ et al.
Written in

MDN Web Docs, previously Mozilla Developer Network and formerly Mozilla Developer Center, is a documentation repository and learning resource for web developers. It was started by Mozilla in 2005 [2] as a unified place for documentation about open web standards, Mozilla's own projects, and developer guides. [3]

Contents

MDN Web Docs content is maintained by Mozilla, Google employees, and volunteers (community of developers and technical writers). It also contains content contributed by Microsoft, Google, and Samsung who, in 2017, announced they would shut down their own web documentation projects and move all their documentation to MDN Web Docs. [4] Topics include HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Web APIs, Django, Node.js, WebExtensions, MathML, and others. [5]

History

In 2005, Mozilla Corporation started the project under the name Mozilla Developer Center, [2] and still funds the servers and staff of its projects.

The initial content for the website was provided by DevEdge, for which the Mozilla Foundation was granted a license by AOL. [6] [2] The site now contains a mix of content migrated from DevEdge and mozilla.org, as well as original and more up-to-date content. [7] [8] Documentation was also migrated from XULPlanet.com.

On Oct 3, 2016, Brave browser added Mozilla Developer Network as one of its default search engines options. [9]

In 2017, MDN Web Docs became the unified documentation of web technology for Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Mozilla. [4] [10] Microsoft started redirecting pages from Microsoft Developer Network to MDN. [11]

In 2019, Mozilla started Beta testing a new reader site for MDN Web Docs written in React (instead of jQuery; some jQuery functionality was replaced with Cheerio library). [12] The new site was launched on December 14, 2020. [13] Since December 14, 2020, all editable content is stored in a Git repository hosted on GitHub, where contributors open pull requests and discuss changes. [14]

On January 25 2021, [15] the Open Web Docs (OWD) organization was launched as a non-profit fiscal entity to collect funds for MDN development. [16] As of March 2023, the top financial contributors of OWD are Google, Microsoft, Igalia, Canva, and JetBrains. [17]

In March 2022, MDN launched a redesign with a new logo [18] and a paid subscription called MDN Plus. [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SpiderMonkey</span> JavaScript and WebAssembly engine maintained by the Mozilla Foundation

SpiderMonkey is an open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine by the Mozilla Foundation.

Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is a deprecated application programming interface (API) for web browser plugins, initially developed for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995 and subsequently adopted by other browsers.

Add-on is the Mozilla term for software modules that can be added to the Firefox web browser and related applications. Mozilla hosts them on its official add-on website.

A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and styling of web pages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web development tools</span> Software used to test the UI of a website or web application

Web development tools allow web developers to test, modify and debug their websites. They are different from website builders and integrated development environments (IDEs) in that they do not assist in the direct creation of a webpage, rather they are tools used for testing the user interface of a website or web application.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GitHub</span> Hosting service for software projects

GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

V8 is a JavaScript and WebAssembly engine developed by Google for its Chrome browser. V8 is free and open-source software that is part of the Chromium project and also used separately in non-browser contexts, notably the Node.js runtime system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WebGL</span> JavaScript bindings for OpenGL in web browsers

WebGL is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerated usage of physics, image processing, and effects in the HTML canvas. WebGL elements can be mixed with other HTML elements and composited with other parts of the page or page background.

The Indexed Database API is a JavaScript application programming interface (API) provided by web browsers for managing a NoSQL database of objects. It is a standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Web SQL Database is a deprecated web browser API specification for storing data in databases that can be queried using SQL variant. The technology was only ever implemented in Blink-based browsers like Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge, and WebKit-based browsers like Safari. As of February 2024, WebSQL is being phased out in favor of WebStorage and IndexedDB and OPFS, but still available in some contexts under restrictive conditions.

WebRTC is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication and streaming to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer communication, eliminating the need to install plugins or download native apps.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a computer security standard introduced to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context. It is a Candidate Recommendation of the W3C working group on Web Application Security, widely supported by modern web browsers. CSP provides a standard method for website owners to declare approved origins of content that browsers should be allowed to load on that website—covered types are JavaScript, CSS, HTML frames, web workers, fonts, images, embeddable objects such as Java applets, ActiveX, audio and video files, and other HTML5 features.

HTML audio is a subject of the HTML specification, incorporating audio input, playback, and synthesis, as well as speech to text, all in the browser.

Emscripten is an LLVM/Clang-based compiler that compiles C and C++ source code to WebAssembly, primarily for execution in web browsers.

WebPlatform.org was a community-edited documentation website spun off by W3C. It sought to create a vendor-neutral online reference of Web platform standards. The project was a collaboration among Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera Software, and W3C, who were called "stewards" of the WebPlatform project.

Web Components are a set of features that provide a standard component model for the web allowing for encapsulation and interoperability of individual HTML elements. Web Components are a popular approach when building microfrontends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WebAssembly</span> Cross-platform assembly language and bytecode designed for execution in web browsers

WebAssembly (Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating communication between such programs and their host environment.

WebXR Device API is a Web application programming interface (API) that describes support for accessing augmented reality and virtual reality devices, such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, Google Cardboard, HoloLens, Apple Vision Pro, Magic Leap or Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), in a web browser. The WebXR Device API and related APIs are standards defined by W3C groups, the Immersive Web Community Group and Immersive Web Working Group. While the Community Group works on the proposals in the incubation period, the Working Group defines the final web specifications to be implemented by the browsers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progressive web app</span> Specific form of single page web application

A progressive web application (PWA), or progressive web app, is a type of web app that can be installed on a device as a standalone application. PWAs are installed using the offline cache of the device's web browser.

References

  1. ↑ "MDN Community". MDN Community. Mozilla.
  2. 1 2 3 Mitchell Baker (February 23, 2005). "DevMo and DevEdge updates". Archived from the original on December 1, 2008. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
  3. ↑ Willison, Simon (September 15, 2005). "The Mozilla Developer Center". SitePoint. Archived from the original on October 31, 2020. Retrieved August 19, 2012.
  4. 1 2 Tung, Liam (October 19, 2017). "Developers rejoice: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla are putting all their web API docs in one place". ZDNet . Archived from the original on October 21, 2017. Retrieved July 29, 2019.
  5. ↑ "Ten Things Developers should know about the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog". Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog. December 14, 2012. Archived from the original on October 13, 2014. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  6. ↑ "About". Mozilla Developer Center. Archived from the original on November 13, 2008. Retrieved January 30, 2009.
  7. ↑ "DevEdge". Mozilla Developer Center. Archived from the original on October 15, 2008. Retrieved January 30, 2009.
  8. ↑ Deb Richardson (February 10, 2006). "Digging through the DevEdge archives". mozilla.dev.mdc. Google Groups. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
  9. ↑ "Brave Browser 0.12.3 Release Note". Github. Archived from the original on October 4, 2016. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  10. ↑ Knox, Dru (October 18, 2017). "Building unified documentation for the web". Chromium Blog. Archived from the original on October 19, 2017. Retrieved July 29, 2019.
  11. ↑ Erika Doyle Navara (October 18, 2017). "Documenting the Web together". Windows Blogs. Archived from the original on October 18, 2017. Retrieved July 29, 2019.
  12. ↑ R, Bhagyashree (July 17, 2019). "Mozilla's MDN Web Docs gets new React-powered frontend, which is now in Beta". Packt Hub. Archived from the original on July 18, 2019. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
  13. ↑ "Welcome Yari: MDN Web Docs has a new platform – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog". Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog. Archived from the original on May 6, 2022. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  14. ↑ "An update on MDN Web Docs' localization strategy – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog". Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog. Archived from the original on January 28, 2021. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  15. ↑ "OWD Steering Committee call, 2021-01-20". GitHub. January 20, 2021. Archived from the original on September 20, 2021. Retrieved February 1, 2021. OWD will go public on Monday, January 25th.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  16. ↑ "Welcoming Open Web Docs to the MDN family – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog". Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog. Archived from the original on January 31, 2021. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  17. ↑ "Open Web Docs - Sponsors". opencollective.com. Archived from the original on March 4, 2023. Retrieved March 4, 2023.
  18. ↑ "A new year, a new MDN". hacks.mozilla.org. Archived from the original on November 18, 2022. Retrieved November 18, 2022.
  19. ↑ "Introducing MDN Plus: Make MDN your own". hacks.mozilla.org. Archived from the original on November 18, 2022. Retrieved November 18, 2022.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.