CSS Property Milestone

Background

Although we have a good amount of contributors, the actual quality of documentation has not improved much in the past few months. This is primarily because the amount of work is so overwhelming that it’s hard to dig in. We’re trying to boil the ocean.

Engineers on the WebKit Dev Tools team are looking to implement a feature where a user in dev tools can automatically be linked to more documentation about a given CSS property. Our goal is to have WPD be the source of that documentation. It will require a fair bit of work on our part.

CSS properties is a great topic to focus on for our first milestone:

• It is a relatively small number of articles (~160)
• All of the articles will have very similar structure, making it easier to track progress.
• We already have a solid foundation and just need to layer on more/better content
• CSS property documentation is one of the most commonly used pieces of reference documentation (no citation; based on my personal habits and discussions with other developers)
• Having an island of strong content makes it easier for us to add other islands of content over time and build up the usefulness of the full site. Instead of boiling the ocean, we just need to boil a number of bathtubs sequentially.
• A launch supported by a feature in Dev Tools will help demonstrate momentum. We’ll no longer be that ambitious site everyone’s heard of, but the site that has real, useful content in some domains.

It’s always hard to prioritize, because it implicitly means that some things will be deprioritized. Hopefully the pros outweigh the negatives here.

Milestone Goal

Documentation for all standards-track CSS properties is as comprehensive, correct, and helpful as–or better than–the current best sources for CSS property documentation.

Design enhancements

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Editing guide

CSS property guide

Project Plan

1. Enumerate all CSS property articles to include in this milestone
2. Pick one representative property and make its documentation the ideal model of CSS reference documentation.
3. Derive content guidelines for CSS pages based on the documentation we created for the representative property
4. Work on a handful of other representative articles to prove out the derived guidelines and iteratively improve them.
5. Implement the necessary template changes to support the final content guidelines.
6. Assign owners for each property, and track progress towards individual quality goals (e.g. Summary, examples, compatibility table, syntax)
7. Review all articles to verify they meet our quality guidelines.

While we’re working on articles, there are a few best practices to keep in mind: after you think your article is done, e-mail the list for others to take a look and review it. You should follow the guidelines as closely as possible. If you discover places where the guidelines should be changed or added to, propose them to the group along with the specific motivating examples.

CSS Properties in Milestone

https://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkRs-89PKiZpdE0xdm9Sb1ZvRW1ZRzMtWEdyU0Z4OEE Note: this document is world-editable and doesn’t even need a Google Account to use.

Useful Resources

• http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto2.12/css/properties/

Status