151–159 of 159 posts
Of all the sort of needless website redesigns I've seen, this one is actually pretty decent. Having gone through this sort of thing a few times myself, I want to give kudos to those who worked on this. In case they are reading this, here's what I liked and what I think can be approved upon: LIKED: - Besides the interactive examples, it looks like you stuck to using standard web fonts instead of loading some bullspit…
Is there a way to collapse the table of contents sidebar like in the old version? I read documentation pages like this on a vertical monitor (which is usually great!), and the sidebar on the new site takes up a full third of horizontal space.
I use MDN heavily every day and this is really depressing. When I first landed on a fresh page today I thought I'd clicked on the wrong link and got some low-rent MDN knockoff by accident. It instantly looked cheap and jarring on a squint test. Also, why is everything error-toned? Red is a danger color and invokes negative emotion almost universally. Red MDN!? Really? I'm a browser extension developer and I'm strongl…
> Also, why is everything error-toned? Red is a danger color and invokes negative emotion almost universally. Red MDN!? Really? It's not all red. They've color-coded each page by whether it's about HTML (red), CSS (blue), Javascript (orange), HTTP (green), or Web APIs (purple). The Web Technology section is also blue for some reason.
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…
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…
I'm somewhat favorably surprised they kept the version history stuff at all instead of pointing to caniuse.com, which specializes in it.
* Code samples that were free of soft line wrapping now have lots of it, because the code blocks are narrower, and the wrapped lines are misindented and confusing.
* The line-height (2x the font height) is too large; this makes it hard to pick out paragraphs, because the whitespace between lines in a paragraph is too close to the whitespace between paragraphs, headings, etc.
* Using red as a link-color is bad
I do like the sticky table of contents and the inclusion of a dark mode, though.
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…
But.. THAT'S WHY I'M LOOKING AT THE FRACKING CHART!
Does nobody remember these announcements from the past 5 years? Why would MDN need a subscription service? Why are Google, MicroSoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. not hosting MDN for free on their cloud platforms? Heck, why are they not fighting over the privilege to host it and put a big “Hosted on Azure” link at the bottom of every page? Why are these multi billion dollar companies not funding MDN when they claim in press r…
Again though, you bring up very good points. With Microsoft and Apple specifically EXPLICITLY throwing in the towel on maintaining documentation for this stuff and pointing people to MDN it boggles the mind how MDN needs money for hosting and subscriptions to fund special content.