Geir Arne Brevik, February 1 2006:
Where do you get your HTML reference?
Although I write HTML and CSS every day, I still need to look things up now and then. And because I always seem to forget my O’Reilly books at home or at work, depending on where I’m working, I turn to Google. Not bad, but the results are not consistently good. W3Schools turns up often, but not always, and their reference is not as good as it could be. And please, don’t tell me that you’re actually reading the W3C specs as a quick reference. Unless you’re a robot.
Compare that to the php documentation on the language’s official site. You can even skip Google, and type in an URI like http://www.php.net/echo and be certain to get a useful result. In addition to the specs, you get to read geeks answering each other questions, a discussion that is often irrelevant but still adds value.
I want something like that for XHTML and CSS. I want:
- Short description with an example
- W3C spec support table
- Browser support table
- Browser quirks and hacks (with links to important blogposts)
- User discussion / wiki for real-world examples
For every tag and property ever made. Preferably written by people like Eric Meyer and Tantek.
Who should host this project? The Web Standards Project?, O’Reilly?, or maybe Mozilla.org should take up the great tradition from Netscape DevEdge?
Or does it exist a holy grail of web developer reference that I (and Google) don’t know?
