Moving the Web Forward

There are a few developers out there such as Christian Heilmann and Paul Irish who are constantly making outstanding contributions to our community. They, and countless others are developing tools and libraries that make our work a lot easier, creating richer experiences and showing us how we can harness web standards to bring these experiences to as many people as possible. Yesterday, a website launched to let us know that we're invited to the party too.

Move the Web Forward is a site designed to help the rest of us give back to the web platform, and its surrounding ecosystem. It gathers together many excellent resources, describing how to contribute to the HTML/CSS specs, how to use and help refine the latest browser developments, and explains why you should be sharing your discoveries with everyone else.

The website itself is just a short document (you can read the whole thing in under ten minutes), but it serves as a launchpad into a wealth of information you can spend hours/days poring over. What I love about devs like Chris & Paul is that they make you feel like you too are capable of hacking together great things; now we finally have a single resource that guides us to do just that.

I'm not much of a writer, but I do like having a space to collect my thoughts and let them distill into ideas I can build things with - the only difference is that I'll now be doing it publicly. I'll probably use this space for sharing the problems I run into, and my attempts at solving them. If something in this collection of writings could save you an afternoon of scratching your head, I'll have justified its existence.

I'm no longer content with browsing Github and Hacker News to check out all the cool shit people have been building. I want to be a part of that. I have to be a part of that. The work we do is a joy because of the people that keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible on the web, and to not give back to this incredible community would be a crime.

I pledge to move the web forward. So should you.