Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others launch webplatform.org

My favorite part is the tongue in cheek title for Tim Berner-Lee: "Web Developer". That's an understatement (as well as a perfectly accurate one).

This all looks very cosy with all these companies supporting it, but I wonder how this site will deal with the more political aspects of web technologies. For example, it's still totally ridiculous that there is not one audio or video format that plays everywhere. You have to dual-encode to two formats. So if you make a game with sound effects, you have to find both a Vorbis and AAC encoder, and if you want to host a video you'll need Theora and H.264 or whatever the deal is there, and so on. So what will WebPlatform.org recommend, given how obvious it is that one format would be far simpler and make for a better platform? Will it side one way or another? Will this upset their "stewards"?

Checked the "No Tears HTML5 Game Development Tutorial" at <a href="http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/canvas_notearsgame" rel="nofollow">http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/canvas_notearsgam...</a> and:<p>- "Because this is a No Tears guide, we'll use jQuery"<p>- Use setInterval() rather than requestAnimationFrame().<p>- Questionable class-like implementation.<p>Granted the original HTML5rocks! post is over a year and a half old, but bad code and bad practices are NOT helping the cause.

Surprisingly the content of robots.txt is:<p><pre><code> User-agent: * Disallow: / </code></pre> <a href="http://webplatform.org/robots.txt" rel="nofollow">http://webplatform.org/robots.txt</a>

Wonderful, just wonderful. I'm glad to have woken up today to find the first item on Hacker News to be several big-name companies <i>collaborating</i> to bring several technologies forwards and more standardized, instead of <i>fighting</i> against each-other for the proprietary implementations of trivial things.

I'd really like to see a 'Web 2012' standard, and 'Web 2013' standard, etc. It's basically the set of APIs which is implemented across all browsers at that date (say July 1st of that year).<p>So as an app developer, you could just design to 'Web 2011' which is the set of APIs fully supported (or polyfilled) across all browsers as of July 1st, 2011.

So if Mozilla is involved, how does MDN factor into this? Are both expected to co-exist?<p>Edit: addressed here <a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/10/welcoming-the-new-kid-web-platform-docs/" rel="nofollow">https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/10/welcoming-the-new-kid-web-...</a>

This would be a good time for the HN editors to change the story to link directly to the webplatform.org site.

Actual link: <a href="http://webplatform.org/" rel="nofollow">http://webplatform.org/</a>

Awesome. I hope this turns into something really great.<p>I know it's in alpha, but my first impression was a bit-off putting:<p>-Look at Hot Topics, figuring this is a good starting point<p>-Click on INDEXEDDB (I don't use it, have only a vague idea what it is)<p>-No introduction. No description of what it is or how to get started.<p>-Instead, a reference with 50 subpages<p>-8 flagged issues: Missing Relevant Sections, Needs Topics, Data Not Semantic, Unreviewed Import, Incomplete, Not Neutral, Cleanup, Compatibility Incomplete

I don't want to be an asshole who just criticizes, but really? It's the best W3C, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Facebook, HP, Adobe, Nokia and Opera could come up with?<p>Just look at these screenshots:<p><a href="http://d.pr/i/EbSt" rel="nofollow">http://d.pr/i/EbSt</a><p><a href="http://d.pr/i/zmk9" rel="nofollow">http://d.pr/i/zmk9</a><p><a href="http://d.pr/i/i9y" rel="nofollow">http://d.pr/i/i9y</a><p>And it took me 5 minutes to load the site - it was down when I first tried it (and on subsequent tries).<p>So, I personally don't think this is the w3schools killer we were waiting for. At least not yet.

Please do not post links with utm junk in the URL.

I wonder why are they not using Mozilla Persona for their authentication system.

With the exception of W3C, all participants are listed in a fair alphabetical order. These egos are way too big to mess with!

Why is it that The Next Web submissions constantly gets more points than the origin link?

Just curious but if Apple is on this why is its logo not there along the others?

I'm impressed that they'd settle on IRC on Freenode for direct chat. Seems like the sort of thing that would not be improved by corporate lawyers for whatever reason.

Why is this site not responsive? Here's how the website looks on a iPhone <a href="https://twitter.com/lukew/status/255327150863941632/photo/1/large" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/lukew/status/255327150863941632/photo/1/...</a>

please let this be the end of w3schools

Is there a community on Stack Overflow that is already offering the same functionality as the WebPlatform forums?<p>Some thoughts...<p>The Q/A format in general seems like a great solution to the problem of sharing the best way to do things because it requires the person asking the question to ask a 'good' question and the person answering the question to provide a 'good' answer. Voting up the 'best' answer gives the closest approximation to the 'right' answer. The WP forum is devoid of any real content. It'll be years before it has anything approximating what SO offers.<p>I can see the wiki format being good as a replacement for something like w3schools, but that isn't really what this appears to be. Plus, we all know that wiki's get out of date pretty quickly with the ever changing technology... unless of course enough people are paid to work on this content... and who says they are the 'experts'. You can already see in the comments here that people disagree with the coding examples. Who is going to moderate all of this?

I was immediately reminded of the xkcd standards comic <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/927/</a>

Is this the Bretton Woods Conference for the web as we know it?

Is there no way to sign up for this without connecting it to a Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or Google account? The signup form indicates that you can sign in with a site-specific account, but I can't find out how to <i>create</i> one.

This awesome, I remember being really frustrated when I started out at my Rails internship because there wasn't any comprehensive documentation for HTML stuff like I was used to with Java, C++, etc.

If a webmaster is looking: "Your first look at JavaScript" [1] is duplicated from [2]. However, what should be internal links in [1] take you to [2]. For example, search "where to put javascript" in the first document.<p>[1] <a href="http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/your_first_look_at_javascript" rel="nofollow">http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/your_first_look_a...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.w3.org/wiki/Your_first_look_at_JavaScript#Where_to_put_JavaScript" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/wiki/Your_first_look_at_JavaScript#Where_t...</a>

I'd rather they come together to do something important, like implementing browserid/Persona. I don't think this will even come close to the usefulness of StackEchange.

It's a really nice initiative by all these giants..Now we'll not have to search multiple sites for learning HTML 5 and CSS 3 at least!

Nice to see that someone is actually trying to bring some order to the current HTML5 chaos: <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/Not_Flash_The_Still_Angsty_Zeitgeist_Of_HTML5_Technology_Burnout.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/N...</a>

Since this is related I'd love to share a similar project I am working on: <a href="http://www.betterfrontend.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.betterfrontend.com</a> - think of it as curated best-practices for Front-End Development.

There is no licensing information at the bottom of each page within <a href="http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/*" rel="nofollow">http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/*</a><p>Can someone clarify what the licensing situation is?

This is great, although I wish it would have started few years earlier.

So happy to see Microsoft on this list. There's hope for IE yet.

Definitely still alpha (as they disclaim). Login doesn't always work, and when it does it sometimes forgets I'm logged in when moving from page to page..

I'm really not feeling this design. It's not bad, by any means, but it seems a little too flashy for what's supposed to be a knowledge base.

Was it so difficult to list the members? I work at 'others' and don't like that you omitted my employer from the title. Thanks.

one thing that would be of huge help, but also a huge undertaking is to allow for selection of targeted browsers, with the least common denominator dictating which code examples you see. for example if IE &#60; 9 is selected, a jQuery fallback would be an acceptable compromise.

Thought these Goliaths were colluding on something else for a second, heh.

Less than 1000 users thus far. Great time to reserve your name.

Hell yes, w3schools can go weep in the corner!

this site runs on php, that is pretty cool! Then again php is good for wiki pages

The skeuomorphic logo is such a terrible choice or did I accidentally miss all of the web's 4-bar linkages?