Mozilla proudly celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Mozilla Developer Network,
one of the richest and also one of the few multilingual resources on
the Web for documentation. It started in February 2005, when a small
team dedicated to the open Web took DevEdge
(Netscape’s developer materials) and set out to create an open, free,
community-built online resource for all Web developers. Just a couple of
months later, on 23 July, 2005 the original MDN wiki site launched and
has evolved steadily ever since for the convenience and the benefit of its users.Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is an open and collaborative learning platform for Web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). MDN goes beyond providing essential coding information; it addresses developers’ needs through its supporting community of volunteer developers, with the aim of inspiring ideas, encouraging collaboration and ultimately, fostering the growth of the open Web. For a wide range of Web developers, from learners to hobbyists to full‐time professionals, MDN provides useful explanations for coding practice, instructions on downloading and building code, articles on how the code works. It also gives guidance on how to build add‐ons for Mozilla applications and apps for Firefox OS, user‐submitted runnable demos of Web technologies, and helpful answers on development planning and strategy.
- 2005: Mozilla obtained a license from AOL to use content from Netscape’s DevEdge site. The DevEdge content was mined for still‐useful material, which was then migrated by volunteers into a wiki so it would be easier to update and maintain. The new wiki was launched in July 2005 as Mozilla Developer Center (MDC), also known as “devmo,” shorthand for its domain name, “developer.mozilla.org.”
- 2010: The name was changed to Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), reflecting the site’s growth into a nexus for all developer documentation related to the Mozilla Project and open web technologies.
- 2011: A “Demo Studio” section was added for web developers to share and show off their code, along with learning pages to provide links to tutorials.
- 2014: The basic learning pages have been expanded into “Learn the Web” content for beginning web developers, including a web terminology glossary, which Mozilla staff and volunteers will continue to develop over the next few years.
- Original MDN wiki site launched on 23 July, 2005
- Today it is one of the richest resources on the Web for documentation with 34,500 documents and climbing
- Currently MDN has about 4,2 million users per month
- More than 20,000 contributors have made about 510,000 edits to date
- 1000+ people edit MDN every month
- So far, MDN editors created 13,200 English pages and made 21,200 translations in 42 locales 142 HTML elements documented, including all standard elements in HTML5, still‐ experimental ones like <dialog>, and never‐standard, deprecated ones like <blink> (for historical reference).
- 275 CSS properties documented, covering 60+ CSS‐related specifications, many of which are still being defined for example, writing‐mode, which controls whether lines of text are horizontal (such as for Latin and most other alphabets) or vertical (for Japanese and Chinese characters)
- 300+ web terminology glossary
- 90+ articles for complete beginners and learners in the “Learn the Web” section, e.g. explaining the basic difference between a webpage, a website, a web server, and a search engine.
Further information on MDN :
Web: https://developer.mozilla.org/Twitter: https://twitter.com/MozDevNet
MDN at 10: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN_at_ten
Newsgroup: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.mdn
