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MDN Redesign

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Re: MDN Redesign

#61

Post by irrational »

asiachick wrote: post #52
irrational wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know that MDN is considered to be the official documentation of the web and is backed by Google, MicroSoft, Apple, etc? Why in the world would you think it is okay to pay for something that is less than pocket change to maintain for these multi billion dollar behemoths?

It is? Since went? It used to be edited by volunteers who often made mistakes and or gave bad info.

Since 2017. Just search “mdn google Microsoft” and you will find lots of links to the press release.

Re: MDN Redesign

#62

Post by dmitriid »

irrational wrote: post #47

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…

> Why are Google, MicroSoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. not hosting MDN for free on their cloud platforms

Can't say for others, but Google has web.dev whose implied purpose is to be the sole source of truth for the web (even if a lot of it Chrome-only)

Re: MDN Redesign

#63

Post by canyonero »

I'll miss the old MDN and never had any issues browsing the docs there. The content is what matters at the end of the day, and kudos to the team for the redesign. I do have a couple of complaints though.

1. Font weight (especially with headings) feels far too thin. 2. Seems like there are some color contrast issues when running in dark mode (my system theme)

Re: MDN Redesign

#64

Post by ectopod »

romellem wrote: post #30

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 guess the plan is:

* Randomly remove features from MDN

* See which ones people complain about most

* Reintroduce these as part of the new paid subscription

* Profit!

Re: MDN Redesign

#65

Post by throwawayninja »

> Warning: The tabindex attribute must not be used on the element.

... Why? I don't use MDN often, mostly just as reference material. I have enjoyed their documentation before, it's always been short and to the point with a few examples and it felt very complete. With this the first article I click on raises an odd question which I feel is either too much detail for reference or too little details for experts.

Re: MDN Redesign

#66

Post by Sateeshm »

irrational wrote: post #43
mariusor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be implying that MDN is no longer the best resource for reading documentation about web technologies. Outside of reading the W3C RFCs, is there something better out there?

W3schools has greatly improved over the years and is often better for a quick lookup.

One thing w3schools has going for it are the elaborate examples. That really helps when it's a new concept you are trying to learn. Mdn is better for looking up syntax

Re: MDN Redesign

#67

Post by seanpkent »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #24

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.

Not being able to see browser version numbers at a glance in the Compatibility Chart really reduces the usefulness. I know I can click on a box to see which version a feature was added, but for certain APIs like MediaRecorder (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaRecord...) this is a lot of clicking! There are subtleties like `pause` being implemented in Safari 14.1 where the rest of the API was implemented in 14.0 I've been bitten by this.

Re: MDN Redesign

#68

Post by 999900000999 »

irrational wrote: post #51
999900000999 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without seeing their balance sheet we can’t know what their costs are. Vague promises are one thing, donating enough to support full time employees at MDN is completely different. Even if the servers are free, they’ll have other costs.

Yes, but we are talking about a who’s who of the largest tech companies in the world, each of which has their own cloud service systems. One of them could host the content and the others could each pay for a full time person and it would be a few magnitudes less than my paying a single penny towards it a year.

I would love for that to be the case, but at the same time Mozilla is notorious with money mismanagement.

I wouldn't hold my breath here for any big company to step up and feel more Mozilla's coffers. That said, I'm open to buying some merch. As in I'll pay $50 for a sweatshirt

Re: MDN Redesign

#69

Post by jrochkind1 »

> Last year we surveyed users and asked them what they wanted out of their MDN experience… The overall theme we saw was that users wanted to be able to organize MDN’s vast library in a way that worked for them.

Really? I just wanna google for what I need and find it. I guess I'm not representative?

Re: MDN Redesign

#70

Post by Strilanc »

Comparing the old version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210302090607/https://developer...

to the new version:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di...

I notice that they:

- Reduced horizontal space allocated to content

- Reduced contrast (eg. code blocks have lighter gray background, compatibility table is no longer color coded)

- Increased the amount of things that don't render if you disable javascript

I'd reverse all three of those if I could.

On the good side they added a dark mode (which I don't care about but lots of people love dark mode), and they seem to have avoided the common aesthetics-over-effectiveness pitfall of adding tons of vertical whitespace.

(As an aside, I find it weird that they mention the home page in the article. In fact it's the first thing they mention. I would expect the home page to be effectively irrelevant? I only ever land on MDN via google searches and direct links to articles via stackoverflow answers. It's random-access reference material. How would someone end up on the homepage? Maybe they have analytics justifying that.)

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