Learn

One of the most beautiful things about the web is that it's constantly changing. While these changes and improvements can be overwhelming, we're here to help you get caught up! Here are some great resources to walk you through how browsers work, and help keep you up to date on their improvements.

How do I keep up with what’s landing in browsers?

• Keeping up with HTML5 and browser support - a list of resources that capture all of these changing things.
• Peter Beverloo’s Blog - weekly updates of WebKit and Chrome
• The WHATWG Blog - summaries of weekly web standards activity
• W3C’s open web - weekly updates about the Open Web Platform.
• Opera Developer News - tracks changes to Opera's web platform
• HTML5 Rocks updates - HTML5 and Chrome breaking news
• Mozilla Hacks - cool apps and HTML5 features
• IE Blog - updates for IE

Follow them on Twitter

You should probably follow: @oDevRel (Opera developer relations), @ChromiumDev (Chrome developer relations), @mozhacks (Mozilla's web developer outpost) & @IE (Internet Explorer Team)

How do I understand how browsers work?

• How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers - in-depth look at how a browser works
• Life of a <button> element (by Alex Russell) - great talk about rendering layout and CSS

Other learning resources

• CSS-tricks - provides a wealth of articles, tutorials, and downloads for the web design community.
• HTML5doctor - a great resource for people wanting to learn about HTML5, its semantics, and how to implement it today!
• Dive into HTML5 - takes an in depth look at a selection of HTML5 features.
• Addy Osmani’s blog - tons of great articles for people who want to learn more about jQuery, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.
• Paul Irish’s blog - all about helping you build cool websites and keeping you up to date on the latest news.
• Dev.Opera - Articles for learning about HTML5 features.
• Web browser, frontend and standards feeds to follow
• YUI Theater - Videos of talks about frontend engineering and web technologies given at Yahoo! over the years (many of them unrelated to YUI).

Reference docs/wikis

• Mozilla’s MDN - awesome documentation regarding HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the DOM, and more. It’s also a great place to contribute! Read How to help and learn how to get started.
• InstaCSS - quick UI to access the CSS documentation from MDN.
• Forward-compatible websites - list of best practices for creating websites that won’t break when browsers are updated.

Meet like-minded folks

Attending local meetups and conferences is a great way to connect with other developers to learn, share resources, and bring new ideas and collaborations to life. Sites like Meetup.com and Lanyrd can help you find events in your neighborhood.

Ask for help

Answer questions and participate in conversations on IRC

How to get started with freenode and irc

• Freenode IRC channels: #html5 / #css / #javascript / #whatwg / #jquery / #yui (on irc.freenode.net)
• Mozilla IRC channels: #css / #js (on irc.mozilla.org)

How to ask for help

1. You’ll probably want to make a jsfiddle first.
2. Create a reduced test case
3. Remember: be specific!
4. Ask on IRC, StackOverflow (even its javascript chatroom), or a group of friends

Help Others

We've all got to start somewhere! Helping others reassures your knowledge, and also broadens the amount of concepts you're exposed to. Below are some great Open-Source projects that are always looking for help. Remember - no patch is too small!

Open-Source projects worth your time

• HTML5 Boilerplate - a clearinghouse for frontend dev best practices
• jQuery Learning Site - educational site for the popular jQuery library
• jQuery Mobile - mobile progressive enhancement best practices
• Modernizr - feature detection's finest
• Twitter’s bootstrap - a css and js toolkit designed to kickstart development of webapps
• Normalize.css - make all browsers render markup the same
• Dojo - the comprehensive frontend app development toolkit
• Lazyweb requests - Web tools and solutions that would be cool to have for web developers.
• jQuery standards project - issues and discussions relating to web standards
• YUI - the Yahoo! User Interface Library

Do what is asked in ‘ask for help’ above and check out Addy Osmani’s podcast about getting involved!

Give Feedback on Specifications

Specs codify the expected behavior. They are developed by Working Groups (WG) along with active discussion on mailing lists. While we can’t always be certain that all browser vendors will adhere to the rules set forth in a spec they provide us with something that we, as developers, can standardize against.

• Learn the history of HTML
• Take an inside look at how the CSS WG works
• Subscribe to these mailing lists to follow and contribute to the discussions that drive the web:
  • public-webapps - technical discussion for the Web Applications Working Group
  • www-style - technical discussion on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and its specifications
  • whatwg - WHATWG's mailing list
  • public-html - W3C HTML Working Group
  • www-dom - where the DOM is improved
  • public-fx - issues affecting the CSS and SVG Working Groups
• Read through the HTML5 Spec for developers (the implementor stuff removed, formatted beautifully for you)
• See the latest commits to the HTML and CSS specs by following their respective working groups on Twitter:
  • @whatwg
  • @csscommits

Explore Frontend Features

Once you’ve picked up the basics, it’s time to dive a bit deeper into the current (and future) state of web standards! Get excited, because here, we check out advanced CSS, brand-new HTML5 features/APIs, and even what the future of these languages are expected to be. Several new capabilities are now available in browsers, and exploring these new capabilities will help us push the web forward!

Examples of how to explore features well

• Global eval: what are the options? - kangax
• Multiple Backgrounds and Borders with CSS 2.1 - Nicolas Gallagher
• CSS background-image hacks - Nicolas Gallagher
• Let the Web move you — CSS3 Animations and Transitions - John Allsopp
• Patterns For Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture - Addy Osmani
• The Cicada Principle and why it matters to web designers - Alex Walker
• Keyframe animation syntax - Chris Coyier
• What's new in CSS Selectors (Level 4) - Shi Chuan
• Everything you always wanted to know about touch icons - Mathias Bynens
• The z-index CSS Property: A Comprehensive Look - Louis Lazaris

Cool features to explore more (and write about)

Browsers ship new CSS features all the time. The vendor prefixes we love to hate are actually there so we developers can provide feedback on if the feature meets our needs. Encourage yourself to investigate if they do! This vendor-prefixed CSS property overview, by Peter Beverloo, has a lot of experimental CSS mentioned; much of which is not well understood. Consider writing about them and the items below:

• The :checked selector / object-fit / background-clip / fx blur css filter / -webkit-line-clamp / text-overflow / box-sizing / CSS columns
• history.pushState(), HTML5 input checkValidity(), getClientRects / getBoundingClientRect, WebKit's ConvertPointFromPageToNode
• CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module (GCPM)
• Differences between word-wrap, word-break, and white-space
• Harmony features like let / block-scoped bindings / block functions / destructuring / rest parameters / default param values.
• Web Components Explained (very early draft)
• Any features from these presentations:
  • The Future of CSS - Tab Atkins on what to expect from CSS in the future.
  • Data, Semantics, and the Process of Progress - browser evolution, Component Model, MDV
  • [JS|DOM].next() - Alex Russell on the next version of ECMAScript.
  • CSS3 Secrets - an interactive presentation on advanced CSS3 functionality.
  • The Future of Layouts in CSS - and how emerging specs will add proper layout control to CSS
  • The Future of CSS - an overview of a number of surfacing CSS features.

Write

Publish what you learn and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Publish to your personal blog and keep your posts updated. Be sure to speak with your own voice! Remember that it is okay to not be an absolute authority on a subject to author a post! Always ask questions and prompt conversations. There is seldom a wrong question or a wrong answer.

Teaching is a great learning tool as well. So, even if you are getting started in an area, you’re helping yourself by writing about it as well. You can always consider asking a mentor or friend for a technical review. (Addy’s done that with aplomb)

What should you write about?

Something you can teach others! Here are some ideas:

• Why do the <br> and <hr> elements (or any element) exist?
• How to create a slideshow with the least amount of code?
• What is the DOM? Why does it exist?
• Check how browsers implement a specific property and compare it to the spec.
• How a popular website implements their homepage (with suggestions for improvement)
• How you would fix a popular website's faults (long load-time, invalid JS, etc...)
• Take a popular demo and make it something else (or use it practically).
• Make a summary of popular ideas around the web lately
• Your experience contributing to an open source project.
• How CSS preprocessors can lead to stringy and bad code if not managed correctly
• If you are a native speaker of a language other than English:
  • Translate some popular English web dev posts.
  • Elaborate on some of the features in the specs.

File bugs

Seriously, all browser vendors would much rather you file tickets with them than tweet about bugs. =D In fact, IE10's platform previews is a great opportunty to file bug reports so things are fixed before they freeze the browser.

• Help the Community: Report Browser Bugs by Lea Verou
• A Web Developer’s Responsibility by John Resig

• Browser issue trackers - search for existing bug reports or submit new ones

  • Mozilla's bugzilla
  • WebKit bugs
  • Chrome bugs
  • Opera bugs
  • Help IE

Hack!

Push the web to its limits! Hack on CSS, advanced HTML, and JavaScript. Hack on the browser's rendering engine. Fork github repos, dig through the code, and keep on learning. Let's make the web more awesome. There are so many ways…

Contribute to browsers

• Help build devtools like WebKit Inspector and Dragonfly. They are written in HTML, CSS, and JS so you don’t need to be a C++ programmer to contribute to these. Write patches!
• Reduce test cases for Mozilla
• Hack on Gecko
  • a list of “good first bugs” for Firefox/Gecko
  • Join #introduction and #developers on Mozilla's IRC server
• Hack on Webkit
  • Google’s guide on how to contribute to WebKit

Contribute to Test Suites

Test cases are fundamental to standards and to browsers. They assure things work the same across browsers. Yet right now, the W3C test suites don't have nearly as many tests as they need. Tests are written in the languages of web developers: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• Get the overview of the w3c webapps test suite, the w3c HTML5 test suite, and the CSSWG test suite
• Look into upstreaming some existing tests into the W3C Test suite
• Upstream WebKit’s LayoutTests. Also see the LayoutTests theory & practice
• Upstream Mozilla’s Mochitests
• Join the convo on public-webapps-testsuite, public-html-testsuite, and public-css-testsuite.
• Contribute to HTML5 Audio on the AreWePlayingYet? test suite

Contribute to specifications

• Review existing bugs on W3C bugzilla - and learn Bugzilla conventions
• Particpate in WHATWG / public-webapps / www-style / public-fx discussions
• Write Specs! we could certainly use more spec writers

Contribute to validators

• HTML Validator needs some developer lovin', deets at lazyweb-reqs/18
• CSS Validator can always use some help. hop on that mailing list!
• WebVTT a video subtitling format, is an active area of standards interest