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Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others launch webplatform.org
- kwamenum86 14y agoMy 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).
- apawloski 14y ago"Web Developer" as in "Developed the Web," I guess..
- hna0002 14y agoOr 'THE Web Developer'
- creativityhurts 14y agoThe Original Web Developer. Should have been Web Creator though.
- drcongo 14y agoI think you might have missed the point.
- rada 14y agoFor those who missed it: http://i.imgur.com/VKgG6.png http://i.imgur.com/VKgG6.png
- _pferreir_ 14y ago"Tim Berners-Lee - Mammal" No seriously, TimBL should need no further title, given their audience ;)
- marcomonteiro 14y agoMaybe they should have added "The" in front of the title.
- krmboya 14y agoIf I may digress a bit, I've always wondered why one is more inclined to say 'systems programmer' rather than 'systems developer'.
- lettergram 14y agoThe web is constantly being developed and changing, a system does not evolve as quickly and is not in a constant state of development. That would be my guess anyways.
- jrajav 14y agoI always thought that the choice of "developer" versus "programmer" swung on how multidisciplinary you had to be in order to be effective.
- thenonsequitur 14y agoI completely agree. I call myself a "web developer" because that's the most accurate description of what I do. "web programmer", "software engineer", and "systems engineer" are all too narrow. On top of programming, I also do system ops, ui design, customer service (and client service), project management. Developing a web site takes a lot more than programming, especially if the team is small.
- zerostar07 14y agoGlad I kept "Web Developer" in my business card all these years. Payback time
- jc4p 14y agoActual link: http://webplatform.org/ http://webplatform.org/
- deanpcmad 14y agoAnd... the site is down!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nkoren 14y ago"This webpage is not available" If that isn't a universal standard, then I don't know what is.
- mhartl 14y agoNow it's redirecting to http://www1.webplatform.org/ http://www1.webplatform.org/. So the address of the website for website standards starts with... www1?!?
- iaskwhy 14y agoJust curious but if Apple is on this why is its logo not there along the others?
- feronull 14y agomaybe they can't use logo yet http://i.imgur.com/VdYXj.png http://i.imgur.com/VdYXj.png
- federicoweber 14y agoThat's exactly my first thought. Apart from the TNW article Apple is mentioned only in this blogpost http://blog.webplatform.org/2012/10/one-small-step/ http://blog.webplatform.org/2012/10/one-small-step/
- leaverou 14y agoApple is a steward, but they chose not to have their logo in the footer. You can see them on the list of the stewards http://webplatform.org/stewards/ http://webplatform.org/stewards/
- georgespencer 14y agoApple is a steward but puts a lot of thought and care into how its brand is presented on its own pages, let alone on those of a third party. In a best case scenario they'd push back the launch of the site to make sure that everything is up to their standards (which logos they appear next to, amongst, etc; what their blurb says), but their second choice is to forbid anything about them on the site whilst they think about how they want it to look.
- wisty 14y agoAlongside Google, Microsoft, HP, and Nokia's logos? I wonder ...
- leeoniya 14y agoplease let this be the end of w3schools
- benlower 14y agoi second that. however webplatform.org will need some serious SEO to displace w3schools. also, webplatform needs some serious work on their docs to make them readable and easy to search.
- bbrizzi 14y agoMaybe if webplatform.org is mentioned in enough places, webplatform will have a better Google ranking and webplatform might displace w3schools. The promotion of webplatform would really help webplatform gain popularity. Do not hesitate to send the link to webplatform ( http://www.webplatform.org http://www.webplatform.org ) to as many people as possible. Share webplatform's site ( http://www.webplatform.org http://www.webplatform.org ) on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc... webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform
- freehunter 14y agoDoes SEO work in HN comments? I know it doesn't on reddit, so I wouldn't be surprised.
- dbaupp 14y agoUser submitted links are rel="nofollow"'d, so no, HN comments and submissions don't help.
- rplnt 14y agoI think they wouldn't do that, but you don't need a SEO magic when you are backed by two of the biggest names in search.
- jonknee 14y agoBeing backed by Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook will tend to have that effect. They'll be fine.
- davidw 14y agoI'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.
- mibbitier 14y agoDon't worry, I'm sure if it gets popular, the lawyers will soon stamp that out.
- ezequiel-garzon 14y agoWith the exception of W3C, all participants are listed in a fair alphabetical order. These egos are way too big to mess with!
- kibwen 14y ago...With the further exception of Nokia, who was willing to be behind Microsoft but absolutely not behind Mozilla. However, the full "web steward" page is more egalitarian: http://webplatform.org/stewards/ http://webplatform.org/stewards/
- ezequiel-garzon 14y agoI completely missed that! Huh... I guess Microsoft-Nokia is indeed becoming an inseparable tandem.
- dt7 14y agoSo if Mozilla is involved, how does MDN factor into this? Are both expected to co-exist? Edit: addressed here https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/10/welcoming-the-new-kid-web-platform-docs/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/10/welcoming-the-new-kid-web-...
- Breakthrough 14y agoWonderful, just wonderful. I'm glad to have woken up today to find the first item on Hacker News to be several big-name companies collaborating to bring several technologies forwards and more standardized, instead of fighting against each-other for the proprietary implementations of trivial things.
- ezequiel-garzon 14y agoIf 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. [1] http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/your_first_look_at_javascript http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/your_first_look_a... [2] http://www.w3.org/wiki/Your_first_look_at_JavaScript#Where_to_put_JavaScript http://www.w3.org/wiki/Your_first_look_at_JavaScript#Where_t...
- gulbrandr 14y agoPlease do not post links with utm junk in the URL.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoWhat the hell does it mean, anyway?
- desbest 14y agoutm links are tracking links for Google Analytics. If the link was clicked from inside a mailing list's email (which it most likely was), and they have Analytics setup with their Email Marketing Provider, it'll put that utm junk on the end.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- killahpriest 14y ago?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=Apple%2C%20Facebook%2C%20Google%2C%20Microsoft%20and%20others%20join%20forces%20to%20launch%20new%20Web%20standards%20resource&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia They're trying to track referrals from Hacker News.
- Jare 14y agoChecked the "No Tears HTML5 Game Development Tutorial" at http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/canvas_notearsgame http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/canvas_notearsgam... and: - "Because this is a No Tears guide, we'll use jQuery" - Use setInterval() rather than requestAnimationFrame(). - Questionable class-like implementation. Granted the original HTML5rocks! post is over a year and a half old, but bad code and bad practices are NOT helping the cause.
- Cushman 14y agoIt's a wiki. Why not fix it?
- tedunangst 14y agoUnless the linked article is incorrect, only authorized employees are able to edit it. So like, it's an article, why not read it? [my bad, it looks like maybe anybody can edit it after registering.]
- Cushman 14y agoI don't see how the red text "Web Platform Docs is an open wiki that anyone can help improve. See the getting started guide[0] to learn more." in the alert box at the top of the page could be more clear. [0]http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Getting_Started http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Getting_Started First sentence: "Anyone can contribute to WPD."
- tedunangst 14y agoI only read the article (which implies only employees will be editing the wiki), then went to the wiki itself later.
- yuhong 14y agoYep, the site says clearly that it is in alpha.
- 14y ago
- gulbrandr 14y agoSurprisingly the content of robots.txt is: User-agent: * Disallow: / http://webplatform.org/robots.txt http://webplatform.org/robots.txt
- wwwtyro 14y agoI can't begin to fathom a motivation for that. Can anyone think of a reason, or is this likely simply a mistake?
- desbest 14y agoMaybe someone from Facebook made the robots.txt file, ayyy!
- criswell 14y agoThe site doesn't even seem close to being useful or complete yet. I think it's intentional.
- acdha 14y agoThey didn't want search traffic until the content and structure start to stabilize? Google, et al. will crawl for years after a URL 404s so it might make sense to hold off until the first round of stabilization
- thenonsequitur 14y agoThe site was in super-alpha. I think it was intentional.
- HendrikR 14y agoThis has already been changed to #User-agent: * #Disallow: /
- AVTizzle 14y agoSo happy to see Microsoft on this list. There's hope for IE yet.
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoAgreed. Now if they would cease support for IE<9 on the desktop and for their mobile browsers pre-WP7, that'd be great. Offering a standards compliant browser for Windows XP (combined with a mandatory upgrade) would help as well. Given that IE9 depends on elements that were introduced in Vista that'll be quite an undertaking, so offering a browser choice menu for IE users on XP would be easiest. Sadly, none of the above is likely to happen.
- mariuz 14y agoMicrosoft and WebGL - Never in IE http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-bullshit/ http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-...
- tlow 14y agoThe skeuomorphic logo is such a terrible choice or did I accidentally miss all of the web's 4-bar linkages?
- yottabyte47 14y agoThe logo is not skeuomorphic.
- tlow 14y agoIndeed it is. It is representative of bar-linkage mechanical systems. Do you have any evidence to substantiate your claim?
- pooriaazimi 14y agoI 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? Just look at these screenshots: http://d.pr/i/EbSt http://d.pr/i/EbSt http://d.pr/i/zmk9 http://d.pr/i/zmk9 http://d.pr/i/i9y http://d.pr/i/i9y And it took me 5 minutes to load the site - it was down when I first tried it (and on subsequent tries). So, I personally don't think this is the w3schools killer we were waiting for. At least not yet.
- desbest 14y agoActually a "2 + 3" captcha is much more effective than a typical one with an image. You'd be surprised. When I ran a phpBB forum that spammers would join to get some of my PageRank 2 juice, putting up a special question on the registration form (by modifying the php code), was much more effective than phpBB3's captcha function with maximum difficulty applied. Spamming software doesn't have support for capctha questions, only captcha images.
- paulgb 14y agoIt depends on the threat. If you're worried about someone writing a custom script to attack your site, you want a hard captcha. If you're worried about random form-filling bot spammers, you want to be unique. I wrote a plugin for wordpress years ago that simply asked you to copy a number into a box. If you had JavaScript, it would even do it for you and hide it so most users never even knew it was there. It filtered out nearly every single piece of spam. This would have been mid-2000s though, might be different now.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoThe problem is, it's always in the form of "x + y = ?", which makes it ridiculously easy to bypass with an script. At least that's what I initially thought. But after some more digging it seems that x and y are hard-coded to be 2 and 3, respectively. I opened the registration page in 4 different browsers with different IP addresses (my own, my VPS, and a couple borrowed from Tor) and in all cases the "security" question was "What is 2 + 3?" Unbelievable.
- jere 14y agoAwesome. I hope this turns into something really great. I know it's in alpha, but my first impression was a bit-off putting: -Look at Hot Topics, figuring this is a good starting point -Click on INDEXEDDB (I don't use it, have only a vague idea what it is) -No introduction. No description of what it is or how to get started. -Instead, a reference with 50 subpages -8 flagged issues: Missing Relevant Sections, Needs Topics, Data Not Semantic, Unreviewed Import, Incomplete, Not Neutral, Cleanup, Compatibility Incomplete
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Apocryphon 14y agoIs this the Bretton Woods Conference for the web as we know it?
- BrianPetro 14y agoLess than 1000 users thus far. Great time to reserve your name.
- waynesutton 14y agoThis is great, although I wish it would have started few years earlier.
- latchkey 14y agoIs there a community on Stack Overflow that is already offering the same functionality as the WebPlatform forums? Some thoughts... 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. 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?
- paulirish 14y ago> Who is going to moderate all of this? Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other stewards have fulltime technical writers working on new content and reviewing incoming contributed content.
- tar 14y agoI wonder why are they not using Mozilla Persona for their authentication system.
- dreamdu5t 14y agoBecause that would require real work and collaboration and actually move the web forward.
- Kilimanjaro 14y agoHaven't rofled so hard in a long time. Thanks for that.
- spazmaster 14y agoWhy is this site not responsive? Here's how the website looks on a iPhone https://twitter.com/lukew/status/255327150863941632/photo/1/large https://twitter.com/lukew/status/255327150863941632/photo/1/...
- leeoniya 14y agoone 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 < 9 is selected, a jQuery fallback would be an acceptable compromise.
- kmfrk 14y agoWhy is it that The Next Web submissions constantly gets more points than the origin link?
- dreamdu5t 14y agoI'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.
- pestaa 14y agoThis is supposed to look like a reference documentation as opposed to a collection of specific questions and answers.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dyeje 14y agoThis 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.
- avar 14y agoIs 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 create one.
- charlieok 14y agohttp://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup&returnto=Main+Page http://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLo...
- ojr 14y agothis site runs on php, that is pretty cool! Then again php is good for wiki pages
- dgesang 14y ago... and then again php isn't good for anything anymore http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
- mvasilkov 14y agoIt's like MDN, only much worse. Why build another low-quality MDN?
- 10098 14y agoHell yes, w3schools can go weep in the corner!
- dfischer 14y agoSince this is related I'd love to share a similar project I am working on: http://www.betterfrontend.com http://www.betterfrontend.com - think of it as curated best-practices for Front-End Development.
- squidsoup 14y agoSome good content here, but the rails specific stuff feels out of place on a site that purports to be focusing on the frontend. I'd consider either making it backend agnostic, or rebrand the site as Better Frontend for Rails developers.
- dfischer 14y agoValid points. My vision is most that popular frameworks have their own best-practices. Initially starting with rails is just easier to target and be used for. Thoughts?
- x3sphere 14y agoI'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.
- grandalf 14y agoThis would be a good time for the HN editors to change the story to link directly to the webplatform.org site.
- Trufa 14y agoI'm truly asking, why is that? If the OP found it through TNW (or any other!), I see no reason why not to give credit and traffic to the news provider? You're just a click away, the link is at the beginning of the article and it is not an add covered site or link bait.
- grandalf 14y agoFor one thing that's what I'd expect based on the title (since the site already launched). If the site hadn't launched, then a link to a relatively contentless news story would be fine.
- mikeleeorg 14y agoOr, a clickable: http://webplatform.org/ http://webplatform.org/
- dj2stein9 14y agoMaybe I want to read the news article describing it first, and then decide if I want to visit webplatform.org or not.
- AshleysBrain 14y agoThis 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"?
- graue 14y agoFor audio at least, things are looking up. Opus, a new royalty-free codec backed by both Mozilla Foundation and Skype (Microsoft), has been standardized as an RFC[1], and will likely be mandatory in WebRTC[2]. So we should be seeing that across all major browsers in a year or two. Opus beats almost all other codecs (MP3, AAC and HE-AAC, Vorbis) in subjective quality[3], so it's a good standard to have. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716 [2] http://jmspeex.livejournal.com/11042.html http://jmspeex.livejournal.com/11042.html [3] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/15/opus-codec http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/15/opus-codec, also http://people.xiph.org/~greg/opus/ha2011/ http://people.xiph.org/~greg/opus/ha2011/
- voltagex_ 14y agoIsn't Opus for speech?
- VMG 14y agoApparently not http://www.opus-codec.org/ http://www.opus-codec.org/ > Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications
- graue 14y ago
- parfamz 14y agoWas it so difficult to list the members? I work at 'others' and don't like that you omitted my employer from the title. Thanks.
- rooshdi 14y agoThought these Goliaths were colluding on something else for a second, heh.
- xxiao 14y agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ why is webplatform better, apple/M$ names are always a concern to me.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoDefinitely 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..
- creativityhurts 14y agoI find it quite sad that these elementary things don't work even for an alpha give the big names that are involved in the project.
- EGF 14y agoI was immediately reminded of the xkcd standards comic http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- dgesang 14y agoNice to see that someone is actually trying to bring some order to the current HTML5 chaos: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/Not_Flash_The_Still_Angsty_Zeitgeist_Of_HTML5_Technology_Burnout.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/N...
- randomfool 14y agoI'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). 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.
- dave5104 14y agoWhat's the definition of "all browsers" though? Are we counting IE6? Only the newest version of each major browser? Would you be expecting web users to be using a minimum browser version? Although a cool idea, I don't see how this would mitigate any issues currently surrounding standards.
- yuhong 14y agoYea, there is a reason why WHATWG considers HTML a living standard. I am thinking that "HTML5" even as a buzzword is a misnomer.
- randomfool 14y agoLatest release version of major browsers (Chrome, IE, FF, Opera, Safari). Have a mobile version which tracks mobile browsers. Once the HTML5 term was dropped (because it's a living spec), it's impossible to refer to any meaningful feature set. Of course it's all HTML, but there's so much variance in what's supported and what is not. If I can then say 'HTML 2011', that means HTML which was supported by RTM versions in 2011. A variation on this would be to say that rather than referring to the latest RTM version of browsers, 'HTML 2011' would refer to the subset of HTML which can target 80% (or something) of worldwide users.
- netcan 14y agoI like it. Something users can intuitively understand. Even if they need to be directed to it to find out. "You need a browser that supports Web 2010 or higher to use this app." On the other side, it would help users pressure webapp developers that aren't supporting their specific device / OS version. "My browser is 2014. Why isn't this working." would be hard for customer service to BS around. THe downside is that even if most of the browsers being used support some 2015 feature now, it would be hard to justify using it in 2013.
- ashish04 14y agoIt'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!
- dhx 14y agoThere is no licensing information at the bottom of each page within http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/* http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/* Can someone clarify what the licensing situation is?