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MDN Plus

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Re: MDN Plus

#241

Post by gfxgirl »

bartread wrote: post #211
chatmasta wrote: post #195

Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this? In general…

I agree. I have no critique of Mozilla for charging, but it's pretty infuriating that big tech calls the shots, contributes so little, and thus puts the rest of us in a position where we have to pay for the privilege of access to documentation of APIs that they define (and churn[0]). These companies really are the pits. [0] Of course, my other bugbear here is that this constant churn adds non-trivial quantities of no…

> contributes so little,

Last I looked most of the browsers were open source and being funded in the 100s of millions of dollars.

Re: MDN Plus

#242

Post by notriddle »

dikaio wrote: post #224
chatmasta wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So put the governments in charge of the standards committees. I would personally never advocate for that, but it’s a potential solution.

Putting the government in charge of anything is almost never the right way forward IMHO

The short version: There is no particular reason to expect governments to be bad at this. Sure, they won't be able to roll out new features as quickly, but there's a lot of private-sector BS and necessary evils that they won't roll out, either, because they won't have to. The state has been in the business of establishing standards since the dawn of time for good reasons. Tech companies are incentivized to constantly release new "U"SB standards, for example, all of which improve on their predecessors in some way, but are a lot less Universal as a result. At the other end of the adapter, on your wall outlet, how many new standards for that plug have been released in the same time frame? Sure, the outlet could be a lot better, but we gain a lot in exchange by just not having the churn.

The long version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200222053906/http://slatestarc...

Re: MDN Plus

#243

Post by zepearl »

KindAndFriendly wrote: post #220
zepearl wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(unrelated to the main topic) > The other day I wanted to learn Svelte... Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences that you had with Svelte so far? Asking because it's on my to-do list for my future frontend (bought 2 books about it, but pending to be read as I'm currently first trying to assimilate "Rust" to program the backends) and I ended up selecting Svelte as potential best candidate after havin…

Pros: - Very easy to learn. If you know TS/JS+HTML, there are ~ a handful new syntax expressions to learn, but otherwise you're good to go. - Easy to integrate an external CSS framework such as bootstrap - Built-int TS support. Being able to use types in your frontend code is delightful. Cons: - The generated output puts the vast majority of the content in the JS files (vs having a least some skeleton or so in HTML).

> Cons: - The generated output puts the vast majority of the content in the JS files (vs having a least some skeleton or so in HTML)

Got it - thank you :)

Re: MDN Plus

#244

Post by charrondev »

culopatin wrote: post #89
KindAndFriendly wrote: post #58

The other day I wanted to learn Svelte. Even though the tutorials on the Svelte homepage are great, I found the MDN Svelte tutorial to be better: it explains the conceptual differences wrt other frontend frameworks well, it explains in detail how to enable Typescript and migrate your projects, and it has a dedicated section that describes different deployment options. While of - of course - all of these infos can be…

Same with Django. It feels like the MDN tutorials come from someone that knows more of what you’ll run into when learning it. The Django docs while great have a bit of that “I built this so let me give you ALL the details or a very basic thing”. MSN is right in the middle.

That’s the difference between the person who made the docs

- Being a good technical writer. - Being some who learned the tool/platform rather than someone who built the platform.

It much harder to write a doc on something if you’ve never been able to look at it from an outside perspective.

Re: MDN Plus

#245

Post by Aeolun »

Rapzid wrote: post #232

I don't feel anyone should need to personally "donate" to MDN or feel compelled to out of some sense of moral obligation; or any other reason for that matter. This isn't a donation per-say, but many on here seem to not care one iota about the features but still express a sentiment to want to "donate".. The major players make nigh uncountable sums of money from "the web". The major browser vendors have pretty much del…

> This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me.

Always starts like that, but once they have enterprise subscriptions I can make a case for onboarding 100s of developers at a time.

Re: MDN Plus

#246

Post by fay59 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #181
fay59 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference with other services is that what people want when they subscribe to Spotify is access to music. What (at least some) people want when they subscribe to MDN Plus is ensure that Firefox and other open Web projects stay relevant. If people paid for Spotify merely so that Spotify stayed relevant, they would probably care in similar measure how Spotify spends its money.

I don't see how claiming that Mozilla is insane helps this cause. I'd assumed these were concern trolls just trying to attack people they've been trained to hate for no reason by propaganda. If these commenters genuinely think they're helping the open web with these comments then that makes both my brain and heart hurt.

Criticism is not always respectful and it stings more often than not but it’s important to long-term success. What would help the open web even more would be to address issues instead of asking that no one brings up. (You’re also very much allowed to be tired of reading it over and over without it being invalid.)

It’s completely fair game to criticize the overhead costs of charities: it’s one of the most common things to criticize about charities, in fact.

Re: MDN Plus

#247

Post by Aeolun »

politelemon wrote: post #18

Mozilla ought to consider offering a bundle, at the moment they have several scattered offerings. Mozilla VPN (Mullvad) Firefox Relay MDN Plus Mozilla Pocket Premium Any others? Though I can see why it's currently scattered, it's not necessary that a VPN user cares about MDN or Pocket.

Yeah, Mozilla prime would be nice.

I don’t even use half of what amazon prime offers, but it feels like much better value for money to me.

Re: MDN Plus

#248

Post by Aeolun »

prokopton wrote: post #239

Why is it region-locked? I'm in Japan—looking at the English page—and the Plus page says it's not available in my region.

That was my first question as well. Guess they can’t deal with the tax implications?

Re: MDN Plus

#249

Post by rhizome »

jraph wrote: post #28

It seems fair enough. It won't prevent anyone from accessing the actual content and it probably makes it easy to justify paying something to MDN to employers. In practice, if you are not paying: - Bookmarks can most certainly easily replace the Collections feature - you can clone the MDN repository for having the documents offline - notifications could be computed from the commit log and the subscription probably mak…

Just to leave a stake in the sand here for future reference, I'm sure they will introduce subscriber-only content at some point.
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