MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

Post by firexcy » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:43 AM UTC

pianoben wrote: post #25

Reading between the lines, it seems obvious that Mozilla wishes to stop funding localization. Translations aren't even that expensive, especially relative to the cost of producing the docs in the first place. It hurts me to see MDN so starved of resources that they can't pay for even that small piece. MDN has been key to so many people's technical education. High-quality web documentation is an essential resource for…

Idk, but ESL speaker as I myself is, I don’t think localizations are that important for technical writings, where few grammar or rhetoric is concerned, and technical terms can simply be seen as “tokens” that can be represented in any language as long as you can identify their “shapes.” Therefore, if you are among the targeted reader group, that the documentation is not in your mother tongue is unlikely to discourage you from reading it. On the other hand, if you are not comfortable with reading technical descriptions generally, having a localized version will not help much either.

Post by Kwpolska » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #161

JeremyBanks wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've chosen to use a web browser that's forked from an old version of Firefox and isn't aiming for compatibility with modern Web Platform Tests, you're going to encounter a lot of obstacles. The fact that you can't see the server-side code generating the failing client-side code, which you can see, seems like the least of them.

What does creating a PR even need in terms of functionality? It's effectively nothing more than a big HTML form with some inputs, something that's been around and working perfectly fine in browsers for decades . The other comment here about how it's like complaining it does not work in IE6 is really pertinent: Yes it damn well should, because I should not need the latest technology just to do something that would've…

The PR form has a bunch of quality-of-life features that would be impossible without JavaScript. The reviewers/assignees/labels pickers are JS-based and fetch data on the fly, the Markdown editor with previews also couldn’t exist with JS. Many of those components appear in other pages, and it’s a no-brainer that GitHub wants to reuse them between pages. GitHub picked a solution for this that is supported (at least partially) by browsers with a total 94% market share [1].

Would it be possible to make a form with all those features and that works (at least with 95% of the features) with your legacy (dead) browser of choice, be it IE6 or Pale Moon? Sure, it would. But to do that, GitHub would need to spend a lot of resources, even though most GitHub users do not need those dead browsers. Those browsers don’t support many modern APIs that web apps need, or that make developers’ lives easier.

Speaking of dead software, Pale Moon dropped support for Windows XP in 2016 [2]. What happened? Why does software drop support for old runtime environments? Because nobody has the time and resources to test things on XP, and to write polyfills for features that XP does not support, or to skip some features because they don’t want XP users to get a worse browser, and because new features can make your software better for the user or more secure.

The world has moved on. Install a modern version of Firefox (or Chrome/ium if you must) and stop complaining.

[1]: https://caniuse.com/?search=components

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser)#Releas...

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform

Re: MDN Web Docs evolves: Lowdown on the upcoming new platform