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MDN Plus

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Re: MDN Plus

#301

Post by cxr »

Sakos wrote: post #297
cxr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the world did you get these ideas? > They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser) No, they don't. The Corporation receives almost half a billion USD annually—over 2.5x what they were bringing in 10 years ago (when they were supporting 20+% of the world's Web browsing; for comparison, they're now at > since it's non- revenue earning What? There's a reason wh…

Much of that is from Google. It makes sense to replace that and reduce that dependency on a single instance.

> I've noticed that moving the goalposts is extremely prevalent on HN, which makes for pretty frustrating conversations (or just reading). And then sometimes it's a tag team. E.g. [...] Personal A offers their response [to someone else, person B1]. Person B2 offers a second rebuttal that abandons the premise behind B1's rebuttal, and may actually be at odds with it.[...] It's like the cross product of a Gish gallop and a DDoS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242>

The comment I wrote was a response to someone who staked their claim on the controvertible assertion that Mozilla "desperately" needs money as a result of Firefox being "non- revenue earning". (Not just being unable to cover the costs for their own existence, but straight up bringing no revenue whatsoever.) That's completely at odds with reality.

You can try to avoid the extant thread of discussion by mentioning something else that's true but irrelevant. At that point, however, it's a completely different conversation. Please don't do this.

Re: MDN Plus

#302

Post by fartcannon »

cxr wrote: post #287
ComodoHacker wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing missing from this announce is the promise that all proceeds go to MDN and nowhere else, like subsidizing a failing product or paying C-suite bonuses.

It's a wiki (at least it used to be). A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort building up the content on the site. Not for nothing—I got an intercontinental flight, a stay in a nice hotel, and a conference ticket in a new city—but many of the people who made the developer.mozilla.org content what it is are never going to see any of that money. The MDN staff, though, some of whom are almost certa…

Mozilla's not a cult. The users of their products are not outsiders. Having someone who worked their frame it like that really illuminates the current vibe I get from Mozilla.

Re: MDN Plus

#303

Post by pevey »

zepearl wrote: post #172
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…

(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…

I'm not the OP, but I find working with SvelteKit to be an extremely positive experience. It has completely re-sparked my love of programming.

For the older people here on HN, maybe you can relate to this: I remember back in the late 90s when the LAMP stack first became a thing. We can poopoo it now, but it's really easy to underestimate the effect that stack had on soooo many developers. Going from static HTML to a relatively easy, accessible, and CHEAP way for any poor developer/college student like myself to generate dynamic content felt nothing short of magical. Suddenly it was possible to create just about anything you could imagine.

There have been many improvements on ways to build web apps since those days, but I have never had that feeling of pure magic since. Until SvelteKit. It is a leap forward, IMO. The framework clicks for me, front end code, server side code, all in the same app, and in a way that from my view could not be easier to understand. It for me is that next leap forward.

Re: MDN Plus

#304

Post by cxr »

fartcannon wrote: post #302
cxr wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a wiki (at least it used to be). A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort building up the content on the site. Not for nothing—I got an intercontinental flight, a stay in a nice hotel, and a conference ticket in a new city—but many of the people who made the developer.mozilla.org content what it is are never going to see any of that money. The MDN staff, though, some of whom are almost certa…

Mozilla's not a cult. The users of their products are not outsiders. Having someone who worked their frame it like that really illuminates the current vibe I get from Mozilla.

I contributed without being MDN staff (which pretty much didn't even exist at the time)—that's sort of the whole point of my comment:

1. Mozilla sets up a wiki.

2. Contributors from the community work the content.

3. Paid Mozilla staff handle the infrastructure and, for better or worse, issue fatwas about high-level project direction—and, to be fair, write and edit some content, too (also for better or worse).

4. Years later, Mozilla starts a subscription service.

5. People not otherwise in-the-know show up and make weird proclamations about promises they want to be made about how/where money gets spent—with nary an indication that they understand how the content that they value actually came to exist.**

If you think my characterization of people from #5 as "outsiders" is off—(to the point of making low-effort, sanctimonious quips in defense of the fanclub's honor*)—then I don't know what to tell you except that we clearly have a different set of ideals. Whatever the case, addressing me as "someone who worked their" indicates not just that you missed the point entirely, but that you're very confused about the basic facts that form the premise of the discussion.

* this is in the middle of a discussion about a failure to acknowledge the existence of people who are actually responsible for the thing that they're fans of, no less

** see also "Who Writes Wikipedia?" (2006) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia>

Re: MDN Plus

#305

Post by asoneth »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #275
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…

The only thing missing from this announce is the promise that all proceeds go to MDN and nowhere else, like subsidizing a failing product or paying C-suite bonuses.

If you're interested in solely contributing to the documentation rather than Mozilla, perhaps consider a donation to Open Web Docs?

"Open Web Docs receives donations from companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Coil and others, and from private individuals. These donations pay for Technical Writing staff and help finance Open Web Docs projects. None of the donations that Open Web Docs receive go to MDN or Mozilla; rather they pay for a team of writers to contribute to MDN."

via https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-...

Re: MDN Plus

#306

Post by asoneth »

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…

With respect to contributing to documentation, it sounds like at least a few "Big Tech" companies do contribute some funding for MDN content:

"Open Web Docs receives donations from companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Coil and others, and from private individuals. These donations pay for Technical Writing staff and help finance Open Web Docs projects. None of the donations that Open Web Docs receive go to MDN or Mozilla; rather they pay for a team of writers to contribute to MDN."

via https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-...

Re: MDN Plus

#308

Post by fartcannon »

cxr wrote: post #304
fartcannon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla's not a cult. The users of their products are not outsiders. Having someone who worked their frame it like that really illuminates the current vibe I get from Mozilla.

I contributed without being MDN staff (which pretty much didn't even exist at the time)—that's sort of the whole point of my comment: 1. Mozilla sets up a wiki. 2. Contributors from the community work the content. 3. Paid Mozilla staff handle the infrastructure and, for better or worse, issue fatwas about high-level project direction—and, to be fair, write and edit some content, too (also for better or worse). 4. Yea…

Ah, well either way, youre a hero for contributing to such a great resource.

Re: MDN Plus

#309

Post by clairity »

cxr wrote: post #294
clairity wrote: post #214

> "In 2020 and 2021 we surveyed over 60,000 MDN users and learned that many of the respondents wanted a customized MDN experience. They wanted to organize MDN’s vast library in a way that worked for them." in 2022, i really hate this "users told us" phrasing, because it's always misleading, and even normative at the margin. users didn't tell you anything, you inferred that from, here, a single survey (and that's more…

> i really hate this "users told us" phrasing[...] this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over Except that's a made up quote. That phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the part you lifted from the blog post (the thing that's an _actual_ quote) or any other part of it.

talk about a "whoosh"!

sometimes we characterize a phenomenon with a succinct phrase that's meant to represent more than the literal quote.

Re: MDN Plus

#310

Post by tdy_err »

mstade wrote: post #290

Wait, so you mean to say I can pay $50 a year for high quality documentation that is eminently useful in my day to day work, and I get things like notifications when said content changes? And on top of that, I’ll be supporting free access to said content to those who might need it he most, like kids learning to program or rookies just starting their careers? AND it’s tax deductible? Pfft, shut up and take my moneys p…

Let's hope that money will actually get recycled into MDN and not just into the CEO's $3+ million salary.
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