Open Web Docs Impact and Transparency Report 2024

2025-01-30 - Florian Scholz - RSS feed

Executive summary

Open Web Docs' work in 2024 helped ensure the long-term health of web platform documentation on critical resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. Founded in January 2021, 2024 marked Open Web Docs’ fourth year of operation!

Open Web Docs (OWD) is an Open Source Collective that employs engineers to publicly document open web technologies. OWD currently employs two full time technical writers, one compat data engineering contractor, and OWD's director to run the program. Everyone at OWD has extensive experience with Web standards documentation, MDN Web Docs, and browser compatibility data. The OWD team writes new documentation, updates existing documentation, and improves documentation infrastructure. Open Web Docs works together with other organizations such as Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, W3C, Igalia, as well as the Sovereign Tech Fund, and other external contributors and volunteers.

In 2024, Open Web Docs:

• Was again the organization that contributed the greatest number of pull requests (PRs) merged to the mdn/content (14.1%) and mdn/browser-compat-data (52.4%) repositories.
• Provided 27% of all pull request reviews to the mdn/content repository and 52% of reviews to mdn/browser-compat-data.
• Became a maintainer of the web-platform-dx/web-features repo and contributed 14.8% of merged pull requests.
• Completed major technical writing and documentation engineering projects which were determined and guided by OWD’s Steering Committee. This included among other things:
  • Collecting browser compatibility data for every browser release, including all beta releases
  • Identify and document missing widely available features
  • W3C WebDX web-features mapping of BCD keys into Baseline features
  • Updated compat data to include browser support version numbers for all features
  • Improving Web Security docs for MDN with the W3C SWAG CG
  • Updated Fetch documentation
  • WebView compatibility data

Previous Open Web Docs Impact and Transparency Reports: 2023, 2022, 2021.

OWD maintainership by the numbers

In 2024, Open Web Docs continued to maintain and improve the following four essential web platform documentation ecosystem projects:

• mdn/content
• mdn/browser-compat-data
• openwebdocs/mdn-bcd-collector
• web-platform-dx/web-features

Open web standards documentation needs ongoing updating and maintenance as new web platform features are introduced and best practices change. At OWD, we believe the above projects are essential sources of information web developers consult and trust and that by contributing to these repositories, we can reach the majority of web developers worldwide with comprehensive, accurate and informative documentation about the open web platform.

For W3C's 30th anniversary, François Daoust spoke about the Web and the art of specification maintenance at the 2024 annual W3C TPAC conference. OWD is proud to play a key role in the maintenance of the web's infrastructure and enhancing the overall resilience of the system.

Git Pulse rankings help put our work in perspective in the overall open-source ecosystem. In 2024, the mdn/content repository is again in the top 10 of all of the repositories hosted on GitHub!

We believe the web-platform-dx/web-features repository is an important project to help web developers discover the capabilities of the web platform. This repository is new in the list of projects that Open Web Docs supports. It uses browser-compat-data and is used by MDN Web Docs and caniuse.com, as well as the Baseline project, among other things. You can explore its data on the Web platform features explorer site and watch Building the web developer's catalog of web platform features by Daniel D. Beck to learn more about it.

Pull requests authored

Since our launch in 2021, Open Web Docs has been the primary organizational contributor to the mdn/content and the mdn/browser-compat-data repositories. In 2024, we also joined and substantially helped with W3C WebDX Community Group's web-features project. Here's the summary of merged PRs authored (excluding bots):

Pull requests reviewed

As in previous years, there's a very long tail of contributors and a thriving community actively involved with our work. For mdn/content, we group all contributors into three categories: one-timers, casual contributors (2-9 PRs) and core contributors (10+ PRs). The 2024 breakdown looks like this:

• 708 one-time contributors with 1 PR merged.
• 166 casual contributors with 2-9 PRs merged.
• 44 core contributors with 10 or more PRs merged.

Supporting this long tail of volunteers is a large part of OWD's work. PR reviews for the mdn/content repository are performed by members of the maintainer group, which consists of OWD, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and W3C staff, and a select group of volunteer maintainers.

We want to give special shout outs to volunteer reviewer Joshua Chen, who alone took on 18.3% of reviews in 2024 for mdn/content, and to Daniel D. Beck who reviewed more than half (56.4%) of all web-platform-dx/web-features pull requests in 2024. It is a pleasure to work with both of you, and your impact in 2024 on these two projects is very noteworthy! Thank you!

Here's the summary of reviewed PRs:

Sovereign Tech Fund

Open Web Docs is very proud to have received a second round of investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) at the beginning of 2024. STF supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure in the public interest. STF’s Contribute Back Challenges selected Open Web Docs as a partner to implement improved tooling and the maintenance of mdn/browser-compat-data and further development of the openwebdocs/mdn-bcd-collector tool.

As part of this program, we expanded on the work accomplished during the initial first round, in 2023, by completing these key milestones:

• Extend OWD’s mdn-bcd-collector to automatically update browser compatibility data. Thanks to Open Web Docs' MDN-BCD-Collector project, browser compatibility information is available to web developers for new browser releases faster than ever: data gets collected every time a new beta version of a browser gets published, with data being made available well before a stable browser version gets released.
• Our collector automatically detects the addition and removal of 90.15% of all browser features for the entire web platform when a new browser is released. Data collected by OWD's MDN BCD Collector is recorded in the open-source BCD project, which is used by several popular web developers tools, such as CanIUse, MDN Web Docs, Baseline and web-features.
• OWD runs tests on mobile browsers and WebViews providing accurate compatibility data for these platforms and highlighting differences between mobile and desktop browsers.
• Open Web Docs (OWD) also made our tooling more generally available, so that new tools, such as runtime-compat-data can display compatibility across different JavaScript runtimes. We are proud that our work on this data contributes to better understanding of compatibility issues, to more interoperability, and better standardization on the web platform.

OWD project work

The Open Web Docs Steering Committee meets weekly to determine project work for OWD's technical writing staff. The Steering Committee is guided by the OWD prioritization criteria and OWD’s charter. OWD efforts are prioritized based on the needs of the global community of web developers and designers. The OWD project proposal process is open to everyone, with proposals reviewed by the Steering Committee.

A few of the major projects Open Web Docs completed in 2024 are:

Collecting browser compatibility data whenever browsers release a new beta version

This BCD automation project's mission is to provide web developers with the latest information about available web platform features whenever a new browser version is released. The project was initially funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund and continues thanks to the support of OWD's main sponsors Google and Microsoft. In 2024, we systematically collected compatibility data 30 times; we observed 11 releases from Chrome (applying to Edge too), 12 from Firefox, and 7 from Safari.

For Chrome 122-132, Firefox 123-134, and Safari 17.4-18.3, we were able to update browser compatibility data within the beta cycles of each browser release. This enabled us to provide web developers with updated information as every stable browser version was released.

2024 was the first year we systematically collected web platform compatibility data. We want to continue this effort and make it as timely and efficient as possible for every browser release for all the years to come. The maintenance of the mdn-browser-compat-data project benefits greatly from these efforts, and the data is accurate, reliable, and complete, which allows the consumers of the data, especially MDN, web-features, and the Baseline projects, to be up-to-date and accurate.

The BCD Automation project is led by Florian Scholz and representatives of browser projects have been reviewing data. Thank you: Philip Jägenstedt (Chromium/Google), Rachel Andrew (Chromium/Google), Chris Mills (Chromium/Google), Patrick Brosset (Chromium/Microsoft), Jon Davis (WebKit/Apple), Jen Simmons (WebKit/Apple), Ruth John (Gecko/Mozilla), Brian Smith (Gecko/Mozilla), Hamish Willee (Gecko/Mozilla), Claas Augner (Gecko/Mozilla).

Identify and document missing widely available features

With the belief that web platform documentation is critical digital infrastructure and a goal of ensure its long-term health, OWD wanted to ensure that all web features were fully documented. When a feature is not documented on MDN, any links to that feature are deactivated and rendered in red. There were several red links on MDN. The goal of the missing widely available features was two-fold: to identify the missing features and then document them.

Thanks to the web-features project and browser compat, the team at OWD forked the WebDX Web Features Explorer and created a backlog dashboard of web features with missing documentation, with the ability to categorize each feature by Baseline status. The most important features to document are features supported in all browsers, which includes Baseline newly available and Baseline widely available and. A feature is defined as "newly" available when all the Baseline browsers start supporting it. It becomes "widely" available once it has been supported in all Baseline browsers for at least 30 months (2.5 years).

Through the dashboard, we identified 600 Baseline widely available web features that have BCD data but are not documented on MDN. The OWD team and volunteers documented 591 of these. The remaining nine missing widely available features are WebAssembly features. OWD first addressed the 133 missing form-related API docs. We then documented the remaining 458 missing features, including missing DOMMatrix, DOMShapes, Error Events, and SVG interface features. A total of 591 additional pages were added to MDN, documenting all the missing non-webAssembly Baseline widely available features. At the time of this writing, there are still a few PRs left to merge, but the pages are written!

OWD would like to thank the WebDX Community Group, specifically Patrick Brosset, for the web-platform-dx/web-features-explorer, Florian Scholz for creating the Backlog Dashboard, Joshua Chen for helping with the missing form-related API docs, Yash Raj Bharti for tackling the missing SVG API properties and methods, Estelle Weyl for documenting the other missing features, and all the MDN Maintainers for reviewing the PRs.

W3C WebDX web-features mapping of BCD keys into baseline features

The mission of the W3C WebDX web-features project is to map all browser-compat-data (BCD) keys to web-features. The goal is to build a shared catalog of web platform features. As of this writing, there are approximately 15,000 BCD keys that describe features of the web platform. In 2024, with the help of the W3C WebDX Community Group and Google sponsorship, OWD successfully mapped these keys.

By creating a common nomenclature for web platform features, the web-features project supports improved communication between web developers, browser vendors, standardization bodies, and other ecosystem participants. From Array to Cascade Layers to Offscreen Canvas, the web-features project identifies, defines, and categorizes the capabilities of the web platform that web developers care about.

OWD provided synchronization of browser-compat-data keys between the mdn/browser-compat-data and web-platform-dx/web-features repositories, ensuring the two projects sync up nicely and complement each other effectively.

This project was a fantastic collaboration between the group of people contracted by Google, including Open Web Docs, James Stuckey Weber from Oddbird, Dietrich Ayala, Daniel D. Beck, and Kadir Topal. Memories from the BCD migration from wiki tables to JSON data came back as we were tracking our progress over the last few months. It was great fun!

Updated compat data to include browser support version numbers for all features

Previously, the mdn/browser-compat-data project used to have incomplete browser version numbers. Features that were supported but for which we didn't know the first browser version that introduced support was, had a version number set to "true". And features for which support was entirely unknown had a version number set to "null". This meant that the compatibility data was incomplete and not always useful to consumers. Most notably, the calculation of the Baseline status was not possible with incomplete data.

Thanks to work led by Queen Vinyl Da.i'gyu-Kazotetsu and Florian Scholz, BCD no longer has "true" and "null" values. All data in BCD now comes with, at the very least, a ranged version number, or a real version number. This also means that compatibility tables on MDN Web Docs will no longer show just "Yes" in the cells.

Improving Web Security docs for MDN with the W3C SWAG CG

One of OWD's major projects in 2024 was to plan and execute improvements to web security documentation on MDN. The W3C's Secure the Web Forward workshop determined that documentation plays a major role in promoting security best practices and in helping web application developers understand security threats and mitigations. In June 2024, the Security Web Application Guidelines Community Group (SWAG CG) was created to develop security guidelines for web application developers. The OWD team actively participated in the SWAG CG, identifying areas where better web security documentation was needed, and getting guidance from experts about current best practices.

One result of this was OWD's overhaul of the Content Security Policy documentation on MDN. This included a rewrite of the CSP guide to align with OWASP and web.dev guidance, to document some of the other protections offered by a CSP in addition to resource loading controls, and to better explain how a CSP can help protect against XSS attacks. OWD also rewrote and reorganized the reference documentation for fetch directive syntax to fix many errors and make the syntax easier to understand.

OWD also developed guides about attacks and their mitigations. The first of these was a cross-side scripting (XSS) guide explaining what XSS is and how to protect against it in both client- and server-side code, using web platform features such as CSP and trusted types. OWD also developed a guide on clickjacking. The web security documentation project is ongoing. The next part of this work will be a guide to cross-site leaks, including mitigations such as Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy (CORP) and Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy (COOP).

This project is led by Will Bamberg. We would like to thank Daniel Appelquist for chairing the SWAG CG and Aaron Shim and Artur Janc from the Google Security team who sponsored us with $20,000 to support this effort and who participate regularly in SWAG calls to give advice and reviews.

Updated Fetch documentation

Fetch is one of the most important Web APIs. The Fetch guide is the third most popular page on MDN, and the most popular page that isn't a landing page like https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/JavaScript. But the docs hadn't had a systematic update since Fetch was first documented on MDN, and they were showing their age. In 2024, OWD rewrote the Fetch guide and the associated reference docs. As part of the updates, OWD added explanations of several aspects of Fetch behavior, completed the documentation of error codes thrown by response-reading methods, and closed almost all the issues filed against these docs.

The impetus to this was an issue that some of the exceptions raised by response.json() were not documented on MDN. It turned out that these exceptions were related to the fact that a response body is a stream: but because we didn't explain streaming responses anywhere, there was nowhere the reference docs could point to.

Adding an explanation to the existing Fetch guide was not straightforward, because the existing guide was so disorganized: people had incrementally added bits to it over the years without considering how they could fit together. So we reorganized the guide, adding not just a section about streaming responses but also sections on other important aspects of Fetch like making cross-origin requests and including credentials.

After that was in place, we could update the Response reference to document exceptions properly, and close the original issue along with a whole slew of others.

Many thanks to Joshua Chen and Mike Smith for their careful and expert reviews as we navigated this tricky bit of work!

WebView compatibility data

In 2024, Open Web Docs joined the W3C WebView Community Group. Together with the group participants, we started investigating compatibility for WebViews. Historically, BCD only contained Chrome Android WebView data, but in 2024, we added WebView on iOS data and helped launch https://caniwebview.com. This collaboration was led by Florian Scholz. You can find more information in the WebView CG 2024 recap. Shoutout to Niklas Merz and Ben Wiser for being the driving forces here!

Project Economics: Finding a Sustainable Future for Web Platform Documentation

Open Web Doc's budget is openly shared with the community on the Open Collective Platform. While this makes our transactions viewable, it does not readily convey the challenges we face when it comes to long-term project sustainability. Memberships, Grants, one-time Sponsorships, and recurring donations are forecasted against known expenses; sustainability requires balancing this revenue and risk. 2024 was a challenging year for open source sustainability across the tech industry, and OWD was not an exception: the OWD Governing Committee made the difficult decision to part with a cherished full-time teammember. This allowed the project to rebalance risk and ensure OWD could make it into the next funding cycle.

To further reduce risk, OWD is working to diversify its funding sources. Membership revenue accounts for the greatest source of financial support. In 2024 OWD was very grateful to have the continued support of Platinum Members Google and Microsoft, Gold Member Igalia, and Silver Member Canva. Additionally, the Sovereign Tech Fund invested 150,000€ in Open Web Docs as part of the STF Contribute Back Challenge (round 2). Open Web Docs also contracted with Google in 2024, for a total of $90,000, to work on the W3C web-features project to map BCD keys into baseline features. The projects we delivered with these funds help people contribute more easily to the web platform, and in this way we think about the maximizing impact of grant funds and funded projects.

We are also very thankful to Aaron Shim and Artur Janc from the Google Security team who sponsored our Web Security docs project with $20,000.

Payroll is Open Web Docs’ only meaningful expense. We pay competitive salaries in our staff's local currency, and receive health care, retirement, and other regionally compliant benefits. In 2024, OWD spent a total of $754,341 on payroll expenses, inclusive of contractors, taxes, wire fees, exchange fees and payroll services. Minor operating expenses ($5.6k) and transaction fees on collective revenue ($23k) account for the balance of OWD expenses. We post all transactions on our Open Collective page.

2025 Financial Forecast

We have forecasted a total of $545,000 in committments from our Platinum and Gold Members, and an anticipated $10k in community donations from Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors. While our forecasted expenses are down from 2024 to $670k, OWD is forecasting a budget deficit.

We're working to close this gap with additional grant applications, special project funding, and new Member support. Becoming a supporting member of Open Web Docs offers benefits in addition to supporting core web platform documentation and engineering. If your organization would be interested in helping us close this short deficit by becoming a Member or making a one-time donation, please email florian@openwebdocs.org.

Thank you to Mozilla and Smashing Magazine

In December 2024, advertisements promoting Open Web Docs appeared on MDN Web Docs, Smashing Magazine, and in Smashing Magazine newsletters. These ad placements were donated by Mozilla and Smashing Magazine.

We would like to thank Hermina Condei, Sonal Sood, Anuja Rajput from the Mozilla MDN team and Mariona Jones and Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine for helping to spread the word about Open Web Docs. The ad spaces are offered to us for free and they promoted our GitHub Sponsors program. Extended thank you also to Patrick Brosset for connecting us and working on copy texts and creative designs which turned out great:

Gratitude for our Individual Supporters in 2024

Thank you to each and everyone who supports us with recurring or one-time donations! Your sponsorship means the world to us!

Individual supporters

Huge thanks to all the individuals who support us with a recurring monthly donation of $10 or more via Open Collective!

Individual backers

Also thanks to the many backers who support us with a recurring donation of $5 or more every month!

GitHub Sponsors

And of course, thank you to all of Open Web Docs' GitHub Sponsors!

Looking forward to 2025

We’re inviting all of our partners and backers for another year of supporting web platform documentation for the benefit of web developers & designers worldwide. We aim to continue with our mission and foster collaborations with existing initiatives to improve the general developer experience for people developing for the web. We consider web platform docs critical digital infrastructure, and we work cooperatively to ensure its long-term health.

We are funded by corporate and individual donations. If your organization or project is interested in advancing open web platform documentation, we would love to hear from you! Please reach out to florian@openwebdocs.org.

Open Web Docs Team in California for W3C TPAC, September 2024.