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MDN Redesign

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Re: MDN Redesign

#121

Post by micromacrofoot »

irrational wrote: post #49
micromacrofoot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care about what Google, Microsoft, or Apple do, it's useful to me so I'm happy to pay a small recurring fee for it. I pay for things that provide value to me.

That’s like paying a subscription to BMW for the seat warmers in your car because they provide value to you.

I don't expect you to care, but wow I'm tired of car analogies. They're usually worse than simply talking about the subject at hand.

It's not at all like that. I pay a one-time fee to BMW to get a seat warmer feature, they're not constantly improving or updating them in my car. They're in my car and they're on or off. If they break and I value them, I pay to have them fixed.

MDN is updated often and I it makes my job easier. It makes constantly evolving spec much more digestible. I'd sorely miss it if it were gone tomorrow. It's a service, not a one-off feature.

Re: MDN Redesign

#122

Post by parksy »

Strilanc wrote: post #70

Comparing the old version: https://web.archive.org/web/20210302090607/https://developer... to the new version: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di... I notice that they: - Reduced horizontal space allocated to content - Reduced contrast (eg. code blocks have lighter gray background, compatibility table is no longer color coded) - Increased the amount of things that don't render if you disable…

I generally agree on all those points, there's a bunch of things I could critique, like shrinking the search bar behind an icon, or things I like such as the more concise breadcrumbs which make the hierarchy a bit clearer.

But overall I guess after thinking about what I did and didn't like about the design, nothing really stood out as a showstopper for me. I like the old design a lot more, but MDN has always been a reference and I dip into dozens of different references every week, getting used to design differences is par for the course. As long as they don't mess with the overall content hierarchy which is great as-is I'm not too impacted.

So my takeaway was if they invest the same energy into the content hierarchy on a page, I think that would add some value. Keep what they have, don't overstuff it, but just making it easier to see "you are here" and "here be dragons". Like on that example you linked there's a "warning" about tabindex that doesn't explain why you should never add one to a dialog - seems obvious to experienced frontend developers but it would leave juniors and people who might benefit most from such a warning scratching their heads or developing a cargo-cult mentality to certain things. I can envisage a content sweep of their warning / gotcha boxes would add more value than a design refresh.

Also generally since their content is constantly expanding, something that makes it easier to get your bearings in the existing content, adding more context cues etc, and quicker navigation between adjacent paradigms or some "maybe you meant this" suggestions that would be neat. I think that's what they were going for by elevating the "related content" on the left - but that's just showing a list of stuff on the same level as the current item. Why would I care about on a page? If you use their search for "proxy" you might end up on a page talking about web proxies, or javascript proxy objects - disambiguation would be awesome for people who are trying to get their bearings.

(then again I usually just hit back, go to my google results, and pick the next page if it's not what I was looking for...)

Re: MDN Redesign

#123

Post by Nextgrid »

JSdev1 wrote: post #17

What's up with the huge amount of whitespace? This is supposed to be an information dense website, most of the screen is empty white. Not liking this, who designs this stuff? How to revert back, or I just need to add custom styles? Update: I added custom styles to remove 95% of the extra margins, padding, spacing, line-height, updated h1/h2/h3/h4 header styling, code highlight styling, and it looks 10 times better, I…

> Why do these important sites never get actual user feedback before forcing out a major update as a big "surprise" ?

The people behind the redesign do so for career, resume & portfolio reasons - they are very unlikely to ever use MDN themselves so they don't care and don't see the problem. You can't rely on user feedback because there's a very high risk users will tell you everything is fine and there's no need for you to mess with anything.

Re: MDN Redesign

#124

Post by sheriffderek »

Is there anything positive about this?

How will setting all of the type close and closer to the same size, removing any any contrast for visual hierarchy, adding muddy zeros, removing any unique character, removing any syntax highlighting differentiation, removing any visual anchors, removing underlines on inline code with links, having nothing to visually reign in rags, adding more space around just - everything, smaller button areas, and a hidden search bar... help anyone? But there's dark mode.

I know that we're going to be weirded out by any* changes... because we look at this daily - but all of these changes are exactly what the books say to "not do." I'm just totally blown away at what has happened here. I'm sorry to anyone who was on the team at this time. I mean, I'm sure you mean well. And I know that most of the docs team was let go recently. But this thing feels white labeled. Didn't they show it to anyone as they were building it? This is about "changing it" - instead of improving it. Well, it's changed! But - now it's worse. I'm pretty sure that's an objective truth. If not, please explain it to me. I'm happy to evolve. Are the jump-to links new? I like jumping to examples...

Re: MDN Redesign

#125

Post by hinkley »

romellem wrote: post #30

Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash, but one thing I think is a step backwards is the Browser Compatibility table at the bottom. Previously, it had the browser version inline for the cell, now it is just a check mark. To see what version, you need to click on the cell to expand some "more info" section at the bottom. Knowing if a feature was very recently supported or has been supported for…

There's some bullshit software on my work machine that is supposed to make it so that we don't need local admin. As if that has ever worked in the past.

Upshot is that Firefox would upgrade, but forget my profile every time. That took months to sort out. Chrome simply won't update at all. Neither will Jetbrains tools, Docker desktop, you name it.

You can try to make everyone upgrade to the latest browser all you want, you're still going to have people running old versions. If you're running a free website, you are at your liberty to ignore those people. But somewhere between 5 and 7 figures a year there's a cutoff where you're going to do backward compatibility because the customer says so.

Re: MDN Redesign

#126

Post by tablespoon »

romellem wrote: post #30

Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash, but one thing I think is a step backwards is the Browser Compatibility table at the bottom. Previously, it had the browser version inline for the cell, now it is just a check mark. To see what version, you need to click on the cell to expand some "more info" section at the bottom. Knowing if a feature was very recently supported or has been supported for…

> Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash

This is the chant of people who've set about forcing regressions on others. Usually it would just be more honest to say, "we don't care about what you want."

Re: MDN Redesign

#127

Post by orf »

hinkley wrote: post #125
romellem wrote: post #30

Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash, but one thing I think is a step backwards is the Browser Compatibility table at the bottom. Previously, it had the browser version inline for the cell, now it is just a check mark. To see what version, you need to click on the cell to expand some "more info" section at the bottom. Knowing if a feature was very recently supported or has been supported for…

There's some bullshit software on my work machine that is supposed to make it so that we don't need local admin. As if that has ever worked in the past. Upshot is that Firefox would upgrade, but forget my profile every time. That took months to sort out. Chrome simply won't update at all. Neither will Jetbrains tools, Docker desktop, you name it. You can try to make everyone upgrade to the latest browser all you want…

Sounds like your company takes security very seriously.

Re: MDN Redesign

#129

Post by JSdev1 »

JSdev1 wrote: post #17

What's up with the huge amount of whitespace? This is supposed to be an information dense website, most of the screen is empty white. Not liking this, who designs this stuff? How to revert back, or I just need to add custom styles? Update: I added custom styles to remove 95% of the extra margins, padding, spacing, line-height, updated h1/h2/h3/h4 header styling, code highlight styling, and it looks 10 times better, I…

Ok I added styles that I am using for the site, I included Before and After screenshots, see link https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/5389

Re: MDN Redesign

#130

Post by CSSer »

I found a bug. If you visit a page with a REPL, the REPL will always use the dark mode style on a subsequent visit regardless of the saved theme value in localStorage. To see this in action visit this page[0], toggle the theme to light (or dark and back again), and then do a refresh. When you toggle the theme to light, the REPL will update accordingly, but this doesn't persist after the refresh. Anyone know who I should tell about this?

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Correction: it only stays dark for me because my initial visit used dark mode. If your initial visit uses light mode, it will stay light even if you later choose dark mode.

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