OWD Project Proposal: Updating DOM guides (and completing its reference)

[teoli2003]

Problem statement

Our documentation of the DOM is really old. Most of the guides have been written around 2005 at a time DOM implementations were not really portable between browsers.

Given that:

• DOM is at the core of the Web, and any beginner must understand it,
• our docs is not coherent, having been edited bit by bit over the years when something has been added/removed,
• have good SEO (2 MDN pages came first when I tried "DOM" in Google Search) ,
• there is almost no information about the DOM in the Learning Area of MDN (DOM in the Learning Area)

we should update this area.

Note that we can split this into different parts, not all necessary to be done at once:

• the guides are pretty outdated and are likely to be completely revised (about 10 pages)

There are other guides to consider, like the Using shadow DOM guide in the Web components area.

• the reference pages can be numerous and we should analyse them more in detail before committing. (How many pages, how many are missing, …)
• Things like XPath and XSLTProcessor that are in the DOM spec should be left untouched.

Priority assessment

This table checks this project against the OWD prioritization criteria.

Criteria	Assessment
Effort	Medium. We will write about 10 new guide pages overall. We need to scope clearly the reference upgrade of the project as this can be a bit of a rabbit hole
Dependencies	No dependencies on the devs.
Community enablement	Low,.
Momentum	No.
Enabling learners	The DOM is a core functionality and having up-to-date and accurate guides and references will clearly help them and make MDN more appealing to them.
Enabling professionals	No.
Underrepresented topics / ethical web	Indirectly, as it makes the step to understand how to make websites easier
Operational necessities	No,
Addressing needs of the Web industry	No

Task lists

TBD