The web standards curriculum is dead; long live webplatform.org!

Around a year or so ago, I was approached by Doug Schepers of the W3C with a request for help — they wanted me to get involved with a collaborative documentation project, which would be comprehensive, complete, and more importantly, vendor neutral. I loved this idea. So much time is wasted when trying to learn web design or look up information to do our jobs because there is so much stuff out there, some of it good, some of it not so good, some of it really out of date, and some of it bad practice (whether that is using proprietary features, not accessible, etc.)

In addition, this idea looked to align well with the aims of the Web Education Community Group — to create great web education resources and spread web education best practices around educator worldwide. we were just missing a great publishing platform to host our material on!

To have a single site rise out of the documentation ashes would be a blessing for the web community indeed.

So, I came on board this project, representing Opera and not quite knowing what to expect. Within a few months I was amazed. Doug had managed to get us, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others agreeing on this stuff, and working together in a way I never thought I'd see. To start the site off, we all contributed a lot of content. Opera's contribution was our trusty web standards curriculum learning resource, which was previously ported to the Web Edu CG Wiki. It now takes pride of place among the HTML tutorials, CSS tutorials, concept docs, and more.

We are a bit sad to see it go, but then again we are passionate about web education, and seeing web developers doing the right thing. An opportunity to maximise visibility for this content was simply the right way to go.

And so followed 9 months of hard work, meeting up, importing content, creating a site infrastructure that would not buckle under such a heavy load of content and visitors, working on a decent skin that was responsive and did not look too much like a Wiki(!), and scrambling around making fixes, right up to the date of launch. Ta da:

Webplatform.org

As it stands, the site is a little rough around the edges. But we are hoping that, with many browser representatives putting a lot of time into this, and with a passionate community coming on board and helping to smooth things out, this site should really grow into something great.

So please people, come on board, fix a typo or two, provide a code example, and spread the word!