A coalition of tech companies announced today the launch of Open Web Docs, a new initiative to help write documentation for Web APIs, JavaScript, and other web tooling and platforms.
The new project does not view itself as a replacement for MDN Web Docs, a website hosted by Mozilla, where all browser makers agreed to move the official Web API documentation back in October 2017, and stop developing their own, often diverging, documentation sites.
Instead, in a press release and FAQ today, the Open Web Docs team said their role is to fund, coordinate, and contribute to MDN Docs going forward.
The new initiative comes after Mozilla laid off 250 employees last summer, including many of its MDN Web Docs staff.
so MDN had become a collaboration between Mozilla and Microsoft; now that that MDN writers team got laid off, will @msedgedev be keeping it fresh?
— Mary Branscombe (@marypcbuk) August 12, 2020
Open Web Docs comes to fill this void and provide the labor force needed to continue updating the MDN Web Docs portal.
The Open Web Docs press release specifically mentions that the project’s role is to function “independently of any single vendor or organization.”
Open Web Docs founding members include the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), browser makers Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Samsung, open-source consultancy firm Igalia, and web monetization platform Coil.
The news also comes after last month, Mozilla migrated the MDN Web Docs platform to a new system called Yari that automatically syncs any MDN documentation with a GitHub repository, making it easier for the broader open-source community to contribute their own updates and contributions without having to work with the MDN portal directly.
We’re excited to publicly introduce Open Web Docs, a collective project between Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Coil, W3C, Samsung and Igalia!
Supporting a community of technical writers around strategic creation and long-term maintenance of web platform technology documentation. https://t.co/pXLBNmeL1t
— Chrome Developers (@ChromiumDev) January 25, 2021
