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Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#11

Post by montroser »

I hope this works for them, but it seems a little bit contrived to me.

If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations. That would be a nice direct value proposition -- "please contribute so we can keep this awesome resource free and high quality"

But paying for customizations? This seems like a distraction for all parties involved. It will take away product resources, it will make their code more complex and harder to work with, and worst of all I don't think anyone will really want it in the first place.

I truly hope I'm wrong, but so far this seems a questionable move.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#13

Post by syshum »

cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

The concern is will MDN still be good in a few years now that Mozilla fired all of the professional technical writers that made MDN good and instead is going for the Wikipedia approach.

I have my doubts the quality will remain

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#15

Post by black_puppydog »

NavinF wrote: post #10
cies wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of this rant I had a look at the company behind w3shools. This is their about page: https://w3schools.sinsixx.com/about/about_refsnes.asp.htm If you want to communicate "stuck in the 90s", take this as your example! The photo of the "Web Masters", the favicon, the W3C-badges, the gif-badge webhosting ad, fixed-width, the CMS400 ad, the bordered boxes around everything. I had a blast.

Personally I found that page and photo to be adorable and it improved my overall impression of w3shools from “an acceptable target of ridicule” to “aww, they’re trying their best even if they’re a bit clueless”. If HN allowed embedded media, you can bet there would be a headpat animation in this comment.

> improved my overall impression of w3shools from “an acceptable target of ridicule” to “aww, they’re trying their best even if they’re a bit clueless”

Funny how that works, huh? Here's a pertinent rule that some^Wall here may^Wshould have seen before:

> Remember the human

https://www.britannica.com/topic/netiquette

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#16

Post by _m4ua »

montroser wrote: post #11

I hope this works for them, but it seems a little bit contrived to me. If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations. That would be a nice direct value proposition -- "please contribute so we can keep this awesome resource free and high quality" But paying for customizations? This seems li…

There isn't even a way to donate. All "mozilla" donations go to the foundation and their social justice causes, not useful things like MSN and Firefox.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#17

Post by Angostura »

cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

I was under the impression that the W3Schools content had actually improved quite a bit over the last couple of years. No?

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#18

Post by pbronez »

_m4ua wrote: post #16
montroser wrote: post #11

I hope this works for them, but it seems a little bit contrived to me. If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations. That would be a nice direct value proposition -- "please contribute so we can keep this awesome resource free and high quality" But paying for customizations? This seems li…

There isn't even a way to donate. All "mozilla" donations go to the foundation and their social justice causes, not useful things like MSN and Firefox.

That’s kinda the point of TFA. Open Web Docs is funded by donations and works with MDN on the free-forever web focused content. MDN is part of Mozilla and just as lost in the woods as the rest of that organization.

You can donate to Open Web Docs here: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#19

Post by jug »

toastal wrote: post #8

The new MDN design looks snazzy but no longer works in NetSurf. I would hope a resource like this was highly accessible, even to browsers without CSS3 support (isn't this why we have @supports?). It's also furthering a trope of themes being a binary toggle; there are more options than just white and gray--how about OLED black to conserve the least about of power (looks better on my screens too).

I agree that pages about web development should themselves not depend on CSS3 support at the renderer because it's a huge step forward from CSS2 and the documentation itself is just simple documents rather than complex layouts. This has the air of web designers not having even considered this aspect and just went with modern web standards as usual. So an issue should maybe be raised about this. As I browse the site, it's rather simple, strongly text-centric layouts here that may be assisted by CSS3 at places but I can honestly not see why there should be a desperate need.

The content of MDN is open at https://github.com/mdn/content, currently a mix of HTML and Markdown but getting transitioned to Markdown. So a different effort could perhaps be made here for a "low-tech" (like CSS2 at most and Javascript-free?) static page generation to live in parallell with the modern pages. It's all neatly organized in a hierarchical structure.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#20

Post by toyg »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #9

This “division of labour” is ironic, as Mozilla fired many of its staff including a lot of its MDN staff.

It's not ironic - gotta make space in the budget for exec salaries by cutting a bunch of low-paid folks. Capitalism at work, baby!
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