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MDN Plus

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Re: MDN Plus

#261

Post by 2143 »

hbn wrote: post #196
2143 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not very often. Next time you're flying across the pond, try coding (without bothering to subscribe to onboard wifi). Also, it can be useful in places where steady internet is sketchy, which is a lot of places. The folks at 100 rabbits [1] would be happy. [1] https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html

Right, but I think those situations are far and few between. If you're a person who is regularly without internet access, there's probably better areas to work in than the web where you may need to deploy emergency fixes on short notice. And regardless, it seems like offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase? It's not like the web is rapidly evolving at all times, with major updates b…

> offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase

Stingy me would just wget download the entire documentation if I anticipate that I might go offline.

Can't say I'll ever be okay with paying for documentation; I don't want that to catch on.

Re: MDN Plus

#262

Post by lIIIllllIIII »

westoncb wrote: post #238
com2kid wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences that you had with Svelte so far? Sveltekit was a bit of a pain to get running, but using svelte itself has been insanely nice. I got an entire internal website up and running with a bunch of cool functionality in ~3 days. The state management with Redux alone would have taken that long if I was using React. Being able to just use regular HTML is also nice. Th…

Just fyi, there is no need to use Redux just because you're using React. If it's a pretty simple case, you can use the built in `useReducer`[0]. Or if you want something that'll scale but that's much more lightweight than Redux, I'd recommend Zustand[1]. [0] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-reference.html#usereducer [1] https://github.com/pmndrs/zustand

Zustand looks so nice. I wanted to create my own state management library just for fun and spent a while brainstorming it and then ran into Zustand which basically does exactly what I wanted (but has presumably been developed by people who know what they're doing_

Re: MDN Plus

#263

Post by chrismorgan »

hbn wrote: post #37

I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to documentation for web development.

I use documentation sources like MDN (via Zeal) or Rust docs (via local files loaded in the browser) while offline not uncommonly—I might go for a few months without doing so, but then I might go for a week of accessing them offline daily. Knowing that I don’t depend on an internet connection for it is very desirable.

But even when I have an internet connection, offline versions of most of these sorts of resources load considerably faster, mostly because I’m in Australia and these resources are normally hosted from America. My experience is that Americans that have always been in America and then travel to the other side of the world are consistently surprised at how slow the internet is away from the USA—and it’s all about latency, not bandwidth.

But I am compelled to admit that the performance angle is fairly negligible for MDN: it’s one of the extraordinarily rare sites that actually loads fast, with nearby TLS termination and content distribution and evidently nothing too outrageous in their coding so that it can consistently load to completion on my admittedly fast laptop from a cold cache and no open connections in well under two second, regularly under one.

Re: MDN Plus

#264

Post by skissane »

> Today, MDN Plus is available in the US and Canada. In the coming months, we will expand to other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

It is strange to see a list of countries which includes New Zealand but not Australia. I am wondering if there is some issue with making it available in Australia? (My first guess was Australia's GST on digital services, but it appears New Zealand has the same thing.)

Re: MDN Plus

#265

Post by girvo »

westoncb wrote: post #238
com2kid wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences that you had with Svelte so far? Sveltekit was a bit of a pain to get running, but using svelte itself has been insanely nice. I got an entire internal website up and running with a bunch of cool functionality in ~3 days. The state management with Redux alone would have taken that long if I was using React. Being able to just use regular HTML is also nice. Th…

Just fyi, there is no need to use Redux just because you're using React. If it's a pretty simple case, you can use the built in `useReducer`[0]. Or if you want something that'll scale but that's much more lightweight than Redux, I'd recommend Zustand[1]. [0] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-reference.html#usereducer [1] https://github.com/pmndrs/zustand

Amen. We've entirely just used `useReducer` in combo with `useContext` where needed, and its been brilliant (this is a 100k LOC React app)

Re: MDN Plus

#266

Post by rswail »

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…

Google "contributes" whatever they are paying to Mozilla every year. The reason Mozilla exists is to maintain "plausible deniability" in terms of anti-trust for the other browser "vendors", which used to be IE, but is now Chrome(-ium).

Re: MDN Plus

#267

Post by rswail »

chatmasta wrote: post #217
mminer237 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If W3C or WHATWG try to "tax" Google, Apple, or Microsoft to participate, they will lose all significance the next day as big tech starts their own exclusive group to define web standards. They completely control all influential browsers. Whoever makes the implementations gets to choose the standards. Unlike governments, standards committees have zero enforcement power.

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

ISO is essentially a collection of national standards bodies that are often under government or semi-government authority.

Re: MDN Plus

#268

Post by comp_throw7 »

pc86 wrote: post #71
cnasc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Mozilla pay their software developers an industry-standard TC?

It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes. The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general. I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienc…

> FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.

FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).

Re: MDN Plus

#269

Post by drstewart »

notriddle wrote: post #242
dikaio wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The short version: There is no particular reason to expect governments to be bad at this.

This. Look at the real NATO, when they band together and tell an adversary (Russia) not to break standards (declare war), they listen. A web NATO would be just as effective. You are right.

Re: MDN Plus

#270

Post by drstewart »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #253
dend wrote: post #63

This is an interesting take on documentation - mainly because I fail to see the value proposition in paying for the functionality provided. Speaking from my own experience: - Notifications. I am not sure that I've ever needed to know when a doc is updated, because if there is anything radical coming on the market (or in a spec proposal), there are other avenues to find out about it. - Collections. That is already a f…

The value is that they've documented every front-end DOM api for you and done a lot of leg work for free for years. This will fund their efforts and they do more than just web, they've also been adding documentation on doing back-end web development as well. I'm sure the more subscribers they get, the more they can add. I sincerely hope MDN keeps the majority of the income from these efforts. For front-end work I ski…

>The value is that they've documented every front-end DOM api for you and done a lot of leg work for free for years.

If that's the value, why don't they lead with that and leave the rest out?

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