Farewell to HTML5Rocks
So long HTML5Rocks, it's been nice knowing you.
After 10 years and 100 million pageviews this commit completes our transition of content of HTML5Rocks to homes that are maintained on developer.chrome.com and web.dev. It feels like a bit of an end of an era.
I was around for the founding of HTML5Rocks. We had so much fun building the serving infrastructure (several times) and creating a lot of the content—from walkthroughs of WebSQL and AppCache, the first introductions to new APIs such as IndexedDB, and explainers for How the Browser works.
Our most popular article was about CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing), followed by dragging and dropping files, and then one of the first introductions to getUserMedia and WebRTC. Contrasting the popularity of core "simple" tasks against the new and shiny capabilities is something that impacts developers today just as much as it did in 2012.
One thing I will miss the most is the community that developed around the site. HTML5Rocks was the first public site I helped to create that managed to build a huge community around it. It was one of the quickest ways to get feedback from developers that could be fed right back into the browser engineering teams. However, over the last couple of years as our priorities changed, "HTML5" became "HTML", and we slowly stopped creating new content and engaging with the community on the site. As the founders of our team moved on, I was left as the only person who could deploy the site and so I felt it was time to ensure that we had a permanent home that has a dedicated team supporting both the content and the infrastructure.
With this transition it was important for us to maintain the content (it's still valuable), but more importantly maintain the in-bound links. People found our content interesting enough for them to share with their audiences, so I'd like to maintain that trust given to us and ensure that all the links will still resolve to the content. If you do see an issue with any of the content, reach out to us and file an issue on web.dev or developer.chrome.com issue trackers.
Thank you to everyone who wrote content for the site, for the people who translated the content so that it could be read everywhere, and all the readers and commenters who made the site the place to go and learn about what's new on the web.
I'm off to register HTMLLivingStandardRocks.com…
♥️ Paul
Photo by Oliver Paaske on Unsplash