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 Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

in 2005 as a unified place for documentation about open web standards, Mozilla's own projects, and developer guides. 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 Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, and

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

who, in 2017, announced they would shut down their own web documentation projects and move all their documentation to MDN Web Docs. Topics include

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, CSS,

Web API A web API is an application programming interface (API) for either a web server or a web browser. As a web development concept, it can be related to a web application's client side (including any web frameworks being used). A server-side web AP ...

s, Django, Node.js, WebExtensions,

MathML Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is a pair of mathematical markup languages, an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. Its aim is to natively integrate mathematical formulae ...

, and others.

History

In 2005,

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, s ...

started the project under the name Mozilla Developer Center, 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. The site now contains a mix of content migrated from DevEdge and mozilla.org, as well as original and more up-to-date content. 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. In 2017, MDN Web Docs became the unified documentation of web technology for Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Microsoft started redirecting pages from

Microsoft Developer Network Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

to MDN. 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). The new site was launched on December 14, 2020. Since December 14, 2020, all editable content is stored in a Git repository hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

, where contributors open pull requests and discuss changes. On January 25 2021, the Open Web Docs (OWD) organization was launched as a non-profit fiscal entity to collect funds for MDN development. , the top financial contributors of OWD are

Igalia Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia_(Spain), Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and ope ...

Canva Canva is an Australian multinational proprietary software company that provides a graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, postcards, promotional merchandise and websites. Launched in Austr ...

, and

JetBrains JetBrains s.r.o. (formerly IntelliJ Software s.r.o.) is a Czech software development private limited company which makes tools for software developers and project managers. The company has its headquarters in Amsterdam, and has offices in Ch ...

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

References

External links

MDN at 10: The History of MDN
{{Mozilla community Mozilla Creative Commons-licensed websites Computing websites Internet properties established in 2005 Wikis about programming

History

See also

References

External links