Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MDN Redesign

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 159 posts

Re: MDN Redesign

#141

Post by mattlondon »

Change is always hard, but this design is way too narrow on desktop where I suspect most users are reading it. The main content is taking up perhaps 25% of available width of a fairly ordinary 27in monitor.

It looks like max-width of the main content is hardcoded to 1440px so everything (sidebars included) has to squeeze into that. As a result there are huge white bars of emptiness on either side, but a lot of vertical scrolling.

Otherwise though I am indifferent to the style changed. It's kinda lost its character and looks really bland but I can live with that.

Re: MDN Redesign

#142

Post by sheriffderek »

sheriffderek wrote: post #124

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, sm…

When viewing the docs in Dash (paid app) - the styles are the old way. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Re: MDN Redesign

#143

Post by seumars »

ourmandave wrote: post #128

Has the look and feel of Microsoft docs (docs.microsoft.com), which isn't a complaint. And maybe it always did in some way.

Yea it's the slightly too thin headings on slightly too grey background.

Re: MDN Redesign

#144

Post by sings »

mjw1007 wrote: post #100
apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #24

I actually dislike the change to the Compatibility Chart. The checkmark serves the same purpose as green vs red boxes did (and is frankly less readable at a glance, not more) and being able to quickly see relative times features were added at a glance made it easy to evaluate whether to use a feature or not. Guess I'll have to revert to using Can I Use? for this again. I had mostly replaced that with MDN.

The explanation in the article is: « So you don’t have to keep version numbers in your head, we’ve put more emphasis on yes and no iconography for browser capabilities » But as far as I can tell all they've done is put a tick there if any version of the browser supports the feature. That means I could have learned the same information from the old table just by looking at whether the cell had anything in it, with no…

It’s a bit surprising that the linked article isn’t more carefully written to explain choices, given the audience. As you say, the reason given doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

Re: MDN Redesign

#145

Post by quesera »

Astonishingly, this article contains 32 non-title mentions of MDN, but not a single link to MDN. What a silly oversight.

MDN is not mdn.mozilla.org, nor www.mdn.org.

MDN is developer.mozilla.org, of course.

Re: MDN Redesign

#146

Post by forgotmypw17 »

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…

I run a free website, and I consider it my duty to support whatever device the visitor happens to be using. Just like if I had a restaurant or a library, I would build ramps for the less than 1% who need them.

Re: MDN Redesign

#147

Post by mekster »

LKNSI wrote: post #92

I hate it, but that is just utterly subjective. I haven't had the time to formulate and ask myself why yet (just saw it 10 minutes ago), but I just feel hatred towards the new design. Could possibly change. The reduction of colors used that gave me visual hints feels like it's giving me less cognitive offloading - and I have to feel the new structure of the page. Maybe my hatred is just because of new(tm) - but yeah,…

Somehow back around 2000, all the design changes felt things improved well.

Sometime around since 2010, most of the design changes seem to be going backwards and I'm starting to hate people change anything as nothing is improved practically.

It's like all changes are done via personal taste instead of through design philosophy for the many.

Like everyone else said, why do we now have to click on every browser name to see if it's supported on 99% people or it's supported on a browser released yesterday?

Re: MDN Redesign

#148

Post by morpheuskafka »

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…

It used to have a very unique custom look and now it looks a lot like a standard readthedocs type documentation for other projects. The reduced contrast of code blocks in particular is a step back.

Re: MDN Redesign

#149

Post by lloydatkinson »

mariusor wrote: post #34
lloydatkinson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it's to try make it seem like MDN is still viable - Mozilla fired a good amount of their staff including allegedly most of the docs team.

You seem to be implying that MDN is no longer the best resource for reading documentation about web technologies. Outside of reading the W3C RFCs, is there something better out there?

No there is not, it’s a situation where everyone is burying their head in the sands. No matter how many downvotes I receive it simply does not change the fact that firing a majority of your documentation content team will undeniably have a huge impact on your documentation content.

Re: MDN Redesign

#150

Post by XCSme »

Not a huge fan of it, before everything was well delimited and had nice contrast cues, now everything feels mushy and hard to skim through. Also, using different primary colors for each category is really confusing.
Post reply on HN