Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

[montroser]

I hope this works for them, but it seems a little bit contrived to me.

If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations. That would be a nice direct value proposition -- "please contribute so we can keep this awesome resource free and high quality"

But paying for customizations? This seems like a distraction for all parties involved. It will take away product resources, it will make their code more complex and harder to work with, and worst of all I don't think anyone will really want it in the first place.

I truly hope I'm wrong, but so far this seems a questionable move.

[_m4ua]

There isn't even a way to donate. All "mozilla" donations go to the foundation and their social justice causes, not useful things like MSN and Firefox.

[chrisseaton]

> If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do

People notoriously _hate_ both these group's approach to funding.

[maccard]

> If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations

There's nothing stopping you donating to mozilla [0] right now, however I suspect many people here will reply that that's donating to mozilla, and not to FF/MDN/whatever, but that's no different to donating to wikimedia [1] or the linux foundation [2].

[0] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/ [1] https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/donate/

[cies]

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish.

MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

[cies]

Because of this rant I had a look at the company behind w3shools. This is their about page:

https://w3schools.sinsixx.com/about/about_refsnes.asp.htm

If you want to communicate "stuck in the 90s", take this as your example! The photo of the "Web Masters", the favicon, the W3C-badges, the gif-badge webhosting ad, fixed-width, the CMS400 ad, the bordered boxes around everything. I had a blast.

[archerx]

"I don't like something so no one should use it!"

What kind of logic is that? I actually prefer going to w3schools because as a quick reference I find what I'm looking for much faster than MDN. It has interactive examples right at the top so you can get a quick idea on what a function does. I am happy that both exist.

Either you are completely out of touch or you're going to need to show some of the "low quality" examples from w3schools.

[onion2k]

I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years.

There's no practical incentive for Google to prioritize MDN over w3schools though. Google doesn't seem to rank sites on quality any more. I suspect they rank sites on "ad profitability" instead. Showing users websites that have adverts means users click on more adverts, which Google benefits from (by encouraging that user behavior even if they're not the ad publisher themselves).

w3schools has been online since 1998. MDN has been online since 2005. Why would Google change the search results in the coming years rather than at any time in the previous 17 years if they were aiming for quality?

[Angostura]

I was under the impression that the W3Schools content had actually improved quite a bit over the last couple of years. No?

[o_m]

You can blacklist w3schools by using ublacklist: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

There are also lists for blacklisting github and stackoverflow content clone sites.

[drdec]

I always just add mdn to the search criteria if it's a search related to web technologies.

[syshum]

The concern is will MDN still be good in a few years now that Mozilla fired all of the professional technical writers that made MDN good and instead is going for the Wikipedia approach.

I have my doubts the quality will remain

[luke2m]

Every page is an .asp file.

[asiachick]

I'm often disappointed witu mdn as well. Lots of old examples using dated JavaScript passing on bad practices

[toastal]

The new MDN design looks snazzy but no longer works in NetSurf. I would hope a resource like this was highly accessible, even to browsers without CSS3 support (isn't this why we have @supports?). It's also furthering a trope of themes being a binary toggle; there are more options than just white and gray--how about OLED black to conserve the least about of power (looks better on my screens too).

[jug]

I agree that pages about web development should themselves not depend on CSS3 support at the renderer because it's a huge step forward from CSS2 and the documentation itself is just simple documents rather than complex layouts. This has the air of web designers not having even considered this aspect and just went with modern web standards as usual. So an issue should maybe be raised about this. As I browse the site, it's rather simple, strongly text-centric layouts here that may be assisted by CSS3 at places but I can honestly not see why there should be a desperate need.

The content of MDN is open at https://github.com/mdn/content, currently a mix of HTML and Markdown but getting transitioned to Markdown. So a different effort could perhaps be made here for a "low-tech" (like CSS2 at most and Javascript-free?) static page generation to live in parallell with the modern pages. It's all neatly organized in a hierarchical structure.

[asiachick]

I find the purple on black to be too low contrast for my eyes and setup.

[Eduard]

Says more about NetSurf than MDN.

[ydlr]

I think Mozilla's structure of having a for-profit owned by a nonprofit has a lot of potential. The problem is that the products they are trying to make money from are also the primary vehicles for accomplishing their nonprofit mission.

A better example is Newman's Own. Their mission is not to make the world's best tomato sauce. That is just how it makes money.

Mozilla needs to find its tomato sauce. Then Firefox and MDN can become the recipient of funds, not the source.

[strbean]

I love the sly assertion that Newman's Own Tomato Sauce is the best in the world :)

Now they just need to make Newman O's better. Aside from the mint ones, those are great.

[maxloh]

I like MDN. But Mozilla's staff didn't solve the code sample licensing issue[0] a year after the MDN's transaction to Yari (the new platform).

For now, it is impossible to tell whether a given code snippet is licensed under CC0 or MIT.

Good luck using code from MDN.

[0]: https://github.com/mdn/content/discussions/5901

[lloydatkinson]

This “division of labour” is ironic, as Mozilla fired many of its staff including a lot of its MDN staff.

[vanderZwan]

Yeah, I'm kind of wondering if I should read "externalizing costs" between the lines or not.

[toyg]

It's not ironic - gotta make space in the budget for exec salaries by cutting a bunch of low-paid folks. Capitalism at work, baby!

[dgb23]

MDN is the single best resource/reference for web development.

In DDG you can search directly there from your browser search bar by typing “!mdn”.

[edward]

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30711915

[wejick]

I really hope this will work for Mozilla. Supporting all works that make them more and more independent.