Introducing WebKit Documentation

Today, we are excited to announce docs.webkit.org, a new documentation home for the WebKit developer community. WebKit is a massive open source project containing many subsystems, and coming up to speed as a new contributor or diving into a new subsystem can be quite a daunting endeavor. This documentation’s focus is on exposing the internals of the web engine in an easy to understand matter.

To date, we have used the wiki features of Trac as our primary documentation tool, and while it has served us well it no longer measures up to more modern systems. Our new documentation system is built upon MkDocs, with theming designed to match WebKit.org’s visual style. This approach provides numerous benefits:

• Built-in search helps you quickly locate articles.
• Documentation can be read offline and online.
• Documents are authored in Markdown, allowing members to easily contribute.
• Theming matches your system appearance (Light/Dark mode).
• Documentation is hosted on GitHub, allowing developers to submit PRs to make edits and review changes.

When visiting docs.webkit.org, for the first time, you will see several improvements. To the left of the article, there is an accordion style menu to navigate between pages. On the right, there is a table of contents to help you easily zoom through longer documents. Above that is a search bar along with a link to our GitHub documentation page. Every article contains an edit button to bring you directly to the source code of the article located on GitHub. In addition, headers within the article can be easily linked to to allow easier sharing of information among colleagues.

Members are welcome to contribute in our new Documentation project repository. Much of the relevant documentation from past systems has already been ported over, but if you notice any missing information please submit a PR.