Live data from Hacker News

The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

blog.mozilla.org

41–50 of 113 posts

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#42
post #24

Can we please have a comments section on every page of documentation?

While the idea seems great in theory, I doubt Mozilla has the manpower to moderate it. The volume of comments would be astonishing, think Stack Overflow's Javascript tag – there are countless questions that have been answered time and again. Sorting and moderating them takes an insane amount of man-hours.

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#43

One thing that would be brilliant and would also help with numerous other issues would be if the site was open source and available on Github. This change would allow numerous improvements such as up-to-date, relevant examples, issues and pull requests for discussions and improvement etc.

MDN is a wiki, so you can in fact fix problems you find.

Discussion is done via mailing list.

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#44
post #24

Can we please have a comments section on every page of documentation?

While the idea seems great in theory, I doubt Mozilla has the manpower to moderate it. The volume of comments would be astonishing, think Stack Overflow's Javascript tag – there are countless questions that have been answered time and again. Sorting and moderating them takes an insane amount of man-hours.

Just for reference, two years ago, during the Mozilla Work Week, one of the main problem that surfaced was that there were just a couple of people reviewing all new pages that were created and hunting for spam/illegal content

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#45
post #8

One thing I think could really make a difference would be wrangling the reference data into some kind of semi-structured format with an API/machine readable format like the Node docs: https://nodejs.org/api/events.json There are a lot of documentation, code completion etc type things out there that currently rely on manual updating (eg Tern.js) or scraping (eg devdocs.io) to maintain this kind of data. It'd be good i…

We're working on this... https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data, https://github.com/mdn/data ...but it's going to be a slow process.

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#46
post #39
post #33

Please stop forcing those stupid horrible-quality Portuguese translations upon me!

To the best of my knowledge, if you go to https://developer.mozilla.org you're just served articles in English (that may be because I have English set as my language in my browser, I don't remember what happens if I set it to my actual native language). But I noticed that Google search results actually are pointing me to my native language.

English is my language in my browser, but they seem to be using IP addresses, because sometimes I get Portuguese articles.

They should keep an endless cookie or whatever to never serve me anything besides English.

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#48
post #30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish someone made a proper HTML RFC, with variable width characters for paragraphs for readability purposes and monospace for code (which should be easily detectable)

Work started on that last year based on the RFC XML format. Or was it the year before that? It will get here eventually. I think it's likely someone will go through old RFCs and convert them too.

I'd be quite happy with markdown.

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#50
post #39
post #33

Please stop forcing those stupid horrible-quality Portuguese translations upon me!

To the best of my knowledge, if you go to https://developer.mozilla.org you're just served articles in English (that may be because I have English set as my language in my browser, I don't remember what happens if I set it to my actual native language). But I noticed that Google search results actually are pointing me to my native language.

They automatically set it according to your location, I have the same problem in France.
Post reply on HN