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MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

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Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#31

Post by nialv7 »

parhamn wrote: post #16
DC-3 wrote: post #12

So they're hoping that they can replace the people they fired with open source contributors working for free.

Man these kind of views bother me so much. They’re taking one of the most (if not, most) useful documentation sources for cross platform web development that benefits them very little, and moving it to a system of open contribution so it can live past the company’s financial problems. And this is your first take?

I think you are both right. This is good for the future of MDN, but OTOH cutting cost is likely to be what motivated Mozilla to make this change.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#32

Post by hyperrail »

newmnhn wrote: post #28
wwarner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted, it depends on how it turns out. But my first impression is that authoritative reference documents of MDN are going to become cluttered with comments and disagreements.

MDN has never been "authoritative reference documents". It's a wiki. Anybody can edit and republish pages, change examples, do whatever. I noticed somewhere about a year ago that it was a wiki, and have made minor changes to a couple of pages since then, when something was missing an example or something. I change, I publish, it's done. And if my change was wrong, or opinionated, or bad, it's just like that until som…

Neither Safari, Chrome/Chromium, IE, old Edge, nor new Edge have substantial HTML and CSS developer documentation on their own web sites. Their vendors - excepting Apple and the WebKit contributors - all chose to work with Mozilla instead to put their docs on MDN: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/10/18/documenting-w...

It seems to me that as far as the browser makers are concerned, MDN is as close to authoritative as you can get without going to the standards documents themselves - and the standards don't give you browser compatibility matrices or make any note of browser-specific quirks.

MDN may be a wiki, but it certainly isn't treated like one by the people who are most interested in it being accurate and up to date.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#33

Post by eznzt »

roblabla wrote: post #29
DC-3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can see, Mozilla have no reason to be losing money other than their own mismanagement.

This is an article about MDN, not Mozilla. How exactly does MDN bring money? Do you suggest MDN should be a revenue source? Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because? This is seriously entitled. Mozilla gave us an amazing resource, entirely for free. This attitude isn't right, it's toxic and harmful. Mozilla is in a spot of difficulty, and instead of taking a resource that is operat…

It's stuff like MDN that attracts donations.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#36

Post by madeofpalk »

whalesalad wrote: post #10
oDot wrote: post #5

I am a big fan of jamstack. For a lot of my client's use cases it allows me to save them a lot of money and headaches while delivering a better product, especially with a headless CMS like Netlify CMS

I still don't fully grok the term. Is it a loose/blanket term sorta like 'devops' or is it a more literal prescription of actual requirements and practices?

tl;dr its basically just static html/js/css sitting in an s3 bucket, rather than having an active server (that you code/manage yourself).

It pushes the page rendering from runtime to build time.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#37

Post by davidweatherall »

luhn wrote: post #34

I'm a bit confused on the diagram for the new architecture: What's the purpose of the Lambda function? I don't see them explain that anywhere.

I would assume the lambda is to invalidate / update the cache on the pages that are being changed as new commits are merged in.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#38

Post by gambler »

>We are replacing the current MDN Wiki platform with a JAMStack approach, which publishes the content managed in a GitHub repo.

So... Ceding control over content to GitHub. Ceding control over uptime to Amazon. (Both done by a company that paints itself as pro-people, pro-privacy, etc.)

>You will no longer be able to click Edit on a page, make and save a change, and have it show up nearly immediately on the page. You’ll also no longer be able to do your edits in a WYSIWYG editor.

The fact that this is presented as some sort of improvement is pure farce.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#39

Post by franga2000 »

julianlam wrote: post #3

First impressions: PR model via GitHub, good. That new platform schema diagram for Yari, looks complicated.

Probably looks complicated because of the names of all the services. In a nutshell, the data lives on GitHub, gets automatically compiled into HTML and sent to a web server. They have basically taken the rendering out of the app server and into a CI task that does it all in advance.

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

#40

Post by 0-O-0 »

pianoben wrote: post #25

Reading between the lines, it seems obvious that Mozilla wishes to stop funding localization. Translations aren't even that expensive, especially relative to the cost of producing the docs in the first place. It hurts me to see MDN so starved of resources that they can't pay for even that small piece. MDN has been key to so many people's technical education. High-quality web documentation is an essential resource for…

Did they actually fund localisations? I'm unfamiliar with their process, but this article game me an impression that it was completely community driven.
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