I really like this.
MDN can't be maintained for free after all, it's by far the best resource I've found for web development.
The next time I have a web dev job I'll buy this
MDN Plus
61–70 of 222 posts
Re: MDN Plus
#62The $10/m right now seems on the high side. Even the copy suggests you're better off not getting this, waiting at least a year for the content to be posted "every month," then subbing for a single month to read it all. Maybe the Wikipedia/donation model would have been a better play for MDN then this, particularly as freemium was originally about micro-transactions, not $2 more than the cost of Netflix's Basic tier.…
I'm surprised by this model being so consumer focused. I think if they offered some kind of enterprise plan where my team could share and highlight critical sections, configure our official support matrix and such, I'd be willing to pony up a few hundred a year from my budget.
Re: MDN Plus
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels more like a service rather than it being a subscription-based donation. It's not called Wikipedia Plus.
If it's to pay technical writers I don't see the problem. Wikipedia on the other hand ask for donations that seems absorbed by some kind of administrative black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
Self Wiking Ice Cweam Cone
Re: MDN Plus
#64I strongly dislike the idea. It reduces deep knowledge to people who can pay for it. The web should be open for anyone. (yeah, Its already not like this, I know)
Your other option is W3 which fills their site with ads.
If I could, I'd pay Google 50$ a month directly to disable all of their advertising across all sites which use ad sense.
Re: MDN Plus
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels more like a service rather than it being a subscription-based donation. It's not called Wikipedia Plus.
If it's to pay technical writers I don't see the problem. Wikipedia on the other hand ask for donations that seems absorbed by some kind of administrative black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
[deleted]
Re: MDN Plus
#66Glad to see they're including content and articles as well. I used to swear by MDN for HTML help, but ever since I bit the bullet and just read the HTML spec I find going directly to the (free) source a far better option. Not to mention there's a developer version of the spec that cuts out the implementor details and lets you focus on developer details.
But now they are competing with free content from Smashing and CSS-Tricks and lessons from a variety of free sources, including Google who has great course content.
I just don't see this saving Mozilla.
Re: MDN Plus
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really understand how offering better content against money is worse than asking for money regularly like Wikipedia does (especially when they seem to just consume more and more money).
A paywall shuts out financially disadvantaged groups and limits the circulation of knowledge. Donations don’t, however annoying the banners are. Whether overly abundant donations are misallocated is a completely orthogonal issue. Note that I’m not saying we are entitled to anything; but slapping the MDN brand on a premium subscription service does tarnish the original brand a little.
But as far as I understand the source article, MDN Plus is not a paywall to the type of content that is already on MDN. What's going to be behind a paywall are a kind of technical essays which are not currently on MDN and some convenience features.
Is my understanding incorrect?
Re: MDN Plus
#68I'd have been more open to this sort of change if Mozilla didn't gut the content team behind MDN last year.
Re: MDN Plus
#69With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable. Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing. Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web” Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed…
It was a concious decision in 2017 to close Google's and Microsoft's web documentation portals so that MDN can be a unified source of truth: https://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...
I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent MDN Web Fondation or something. Mozilla seems to have a poor track record of maintaining anything as we saw when they fired most of the people working on MDN and other engineers despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email, the whole non-profit Mozilla vs for profit Mozilla structure is just awful.
MDN is its only gem left outside of Firefox itself, it's good they're doing this though, but only if all proceeds go primarily towards MDN itself. I can foresee people unsubscribing over funding issues if they find out Mozilla foundation is just pocketing profits from this for things outside of MDN.
Re: MDN Plus
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be including Microsoft in that list. Microsoft's own documentation is excellent.
Have you ever looked at MS documentation of the SharePoint REST API?
How's MDN's sharepoint documentation?
The point is that the MSDN documentation for HTML and IE was quite good, and then it was deprecated in favor of MDN's superior documentation.