33 ms·

Introducing Open Web Docs

323 points by kylealden 6y ago

FrontAid 6y ago
That is great news! Thank you Florian, Robert, and everybody involved.
shmageggy 6y ago
Had to click through a few links to get real info. From https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/updates/introducing-open-web-docs https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/updates/introducing... > Questions and answers > Q: Is this a new docs platform? > A: No, we are working closely together with existing platforms, and our current priority is contributions to MDN Web Docs. > Q: Is this a competitor/replacement for MDN Web Docs? > A: No. Open Web Docs writers contribute to important developer documentation resources, including MDN. Mozilla is a part of Open Web Docs and a member of its Steering Committee. > Q: How is Open Web Docs funded? > A: Open Web Docs is funded by contributions from our founding sponsors Coil, Google and Microsoft, and contributors from the wider developer community such as Igalia. We welcome more backers who want to ensure support for long-term maintenance of web platform technology documentation.
- dang 6y ago
  This comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913083, but because the article it links to is clearly the more informative one, we merged that thread into this submission. Thanks for pointing that out!
arrayjumper 6y ago
Wow, was checking out the transactions at https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/transactions?offset=30 https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/transactions?offset... and I see that Google and Microsoft have collectively contributed $500k. Happy to see that there is corporate sponsorship for this. Gives me some hope that this will allow MDN to outlast any eventuality that might befall Mozilla.
- tgv 6y ago
  Or as The Reg called it: “Google, Microsoft pitch in some spare change to keep Mozilla's Web Docs online bible alive. Turns out having coherent API documentation is useful for, well, everyone” https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    Headline is correct: https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/
- input_sh 6y ago
  And a small Coil, who you've probably never heard of before, donated 40% of Google's/Microsoft's amount ($100k). That's pennies to Google/Microsoft. For Coil.com on the other hand... For the unaware, Coil is a subscription service that you pay a certain amount to, and that amount gets spread through websites you visit that have a WebMonetization tag in the <head> element: <meta name="monetization" content="crypto-address-here"> Pretty cool initiative. My personal website earned a total of $1 from it so far.
  - mike-cardwell 6y ago
    I've come across this before. In order to receive money, I should just be able to put: <meta name="monetization" content="bitcoin:my-bitcoin-address"> Or similar, on my website. Doesn't work that way though. I have to sign up with somebody like coil.com and put an address they give me on my websites. This is just worse. Much much worse than it needs to be.
    - ahopebailie 6y ago
      That's where the idea started but that means the user has to be able to send Bitcoin. The purpose of Interledger is to abstract away that issue which is why Web Monetization is built on Interledger. You don't have to sign up with Coil to earn. There are other wallets that are on the Interledger network such as Uphold and Gatehub that can give you a payment pointer to put into your site's HTML. If you want your earnings to be converted to BTC that's possible I think.
pm90 6y ago
Hmm, can someone TLDR what this is supposed to be? I did read the article but I didn't understand what this is trying to do. It just mentions something about the "collective health of something".
- hayksaakian 6y ago
  it's a separate legal entity, independent of Mozilla intended to document the web. It seems like they're going to 'own' MDN from a funding perspective among other future proejcts my short summary is: Mozilla is spinning-off MDN into a separate entity that separate entity may attracting funding and donations that wouldn't normally contribute to Mozilla for various reasons in the same amounts
  - ksec 6y ago
    >Mozilla is spinning-off MDN into a separate entity They should have just put this as headline instead. Sigh.
    - hayksaakian 6y ago
      it's ambiguous, because technically Mozilla could retain ownership of MDN but delegate maintenance to this new entity.
- danaliv 6y ago
  I didn’t get it either at first. But MDN Web Docs is Mozilla’s (very good, IMHO) web developer documentation site. Open Web Docs is apparently some kind of foundation/organization to collaborate on web documentation with other industry folks so it’s not held in just one company’s hands. (Take this with a grain of salt. I’m still only half-sure I get it.) ETA: hayksaakian succeeded in saying what I was trying but failing to say. :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- 6y ago
user3939382 6y ago
Firefox pings Mozilla's servers unnecessarily when it launches regardless of the strictest telemetry or privacy settings, including those buried in about:config. I want Firefox to launch to a blank tab and emit 0 connections until I explicitly initiate a connection event through the UI, whereupon I want the connections to be directly associated with my UI interactions. Without that, Mozilla can track my usage of Firefox which I do not want, anonymized or otherwise. Until that is accomplished, which would be very easy for Mozilla, I don't care one lick about their new initiatives. Until this is fixed they are fraudulently peddling misleading privacy claims to users.
- cornedor 6y ago
  Is there currently a "modern" browser that does that?
  - 22c 6y ago
    I believe Watefox and Tor Browser both have this functionality removed from the Firefox codebase. I am not sure about Pale Moon or Basilisk, but I suspect they may also have less telemetry.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Compile Firefox yourself and remove that functionality?
- laurent92 6y ago
  What most annoys me about Mozilla is literally the quantity of advertising. - They open front pages to advertise about privacy and how much they respect it, - And when you’ve closed all of that, they do advertising (last one was for MLK) in new tabs, - And they’ll even pursue you by email to tell you how good they are, even though I specifically untick subscribe boxes everywhere I can. It is literally Big Brother going through every channel to tell you how much Big Brother cares about you !
- httpsterio 6y ago
  This comment isn't really relevant to this topic though, I don't think it's a good idea to bring every single Mozilla related gripe you have into a thread that is only semi-relevant.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
teruakohatu 6y ago
I don't understand why Mozilla cannot see that MDN should be part of their core mission. I can understand spinning off Thunderbird and Sunbird, but this really seems a big step in the wrong direction. Today their Mission webpage[1] states : "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." According to the Wayback Machine, 8 years ago that page[2] said: "Our mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet." Surely documenting open standards and educating developers is part of both the current mission just as much as the almost decade old mission? Along with the "Internet Society" (.org) I can't think any of any other organizations that are, in my opinion, so misguided as they are critically important to the future of the free internet. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120331122341/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120331122341/https://www.mozil...
- musicale 6y ago
  MDN is awesome; it's the Mozilla "product" that I use most often (though I do use Firefox as a secondary browser and Firefox focus as a junk content blocker) and I definitely include it in the "best of Mozilla" category.
- jimmont 6y ago
  Can you explain what makes this seem to be out of sync with this mission focus as you've emphasized? My read of this is their interest in expanding the existing effort somehow, focused initially on MDN. Separate from this doc effort I've wondered why Mozilla hasn't emphasized business opportunities around communications like VPN services, etc until recently as it overlaps with their mission, expertise and appears to be a legitimate business opportunity at scale. It's not my area of knowledge, only a speculation from some observation.
  - wegs 6y ago
    I kinda feel like there ought to be some coherent effort to archive all this documentation, beyond archive.org (perhaps in collaboration with?). Good developer docs have source code, and are often interactive (you can play with code in a sandbox). Much of that stuff is either on personal web sites and blogs (often with unknown licensing) or behind corporate paywalls. There ought to be a place this stuff goes, and is forever archived, searchable, and usable. I'd actually extend that beyond software too. Educational materials. Service manuals for my car or vacuum cleaner. There's lots of stuff which ought to live forever for the benefit of humanity. And perhaps software itself. I ought to be able to pull up Netscape 2.0 or Flash and run it in a sandbox. Archive.org is designed to archive everything on the web. I'm thinking something thoughtful and deliberate where people (even paying for it) stick content into a permanent archive. If I'm running a startup, and I'd like to give you a guarantee of long-term support, I stick my support materials there, and they can outlast me. Hmmm... That was a bit rambling and not too crisp, but perhaps someone can think of ways to make it crisp?
franciscop 6y ago
It retracts from the credibility of a documentation platform that the blog post announcing it makes one of the most basic mistakes of writing text online; line length should be kept to 60-80 characters to make it readable. It can be stretched a bit up to 100 chars depending on font-size, line-height, etc, but this blog post features a whooping 163!
- gnomewascool 6y ago
  > that the blog post announcing it makes one of the most basic mistakes of writing text online Your comment is a valid criticism of the Open Collective website (if you at all feel like it, please send it directly to them — see the bottom of the webpage), but it's not the fault of the "Open Web Docs" project. They probably have little more influence on the design of the website than somebody using indiegogo, patreon or kickstarter has on the respective platforms.
  - franciscop 6y ago
    From the wording, naming and UI I thought that Open Collective itself was introducing this project!
  - piamancini 6y ago
    Hi - Pia from Open Collective here. Thanks for the ping on this. We deployed a quick fix to reduce the width and we'll look at it with more time.
- piamancini 6y ago
  Hi Francisco - Pia from Open Collective here. Thanks for the ping on this. We deployed a quick fix to reduce the width and we'll look at it with more time.
  - franciscop 6y ago
    That's much better and more readable! Thanks for the super-quick fix!
ecmascript 6y ago
Great stuff but honestly I think this is a mistake: > Q: Is this a new docs platform? > A: No, we are working closely together with existing platforms, and our current priority is contributions to MDN Web Docs. The web needs another platform for this, Mozilla can't be trusted.
- callahad 6y ago
  > The web needs another platform for this, Mozilla can't be trusted. You don't have to trust Mozilla. All written MDN content is licensed as CC-BY-SA-2.5, and all code snippets are either CC0 or, for snippets over a decade old, MIT. And it's all in Git: https://github.com/mdn/content https://github.com/mdn/content So if the Web as a whole ever completely loses faith in Mozilla's ability to sustain the MDN platform, all of the content is licensed in such a way as to make it trivial to fork. There was even an attempt at spinning out the docs ~8 years ago (https://webplatform.org/ https://webplatform.org/), which ultimately collapsed back into MDN.
sradman 6y ago
Microsoft's description of the project [1]: > Open Web Docs, a new collective which is dedicated to sustainably supporting high-quality, browser-agnostic, community-driven web developer documentation. Open Web Docs employs full-time writing staff to support the development and maintenance of web developer documentation, independent of any one vendor or organization. [1] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/01/25/welcome-open-web-docs/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/01/25/welcome-open-...
amelius 6y ago
I hope the actual documentation contains a comment section (so we can discuss the material where it makes sense, and not e.g. on stackoverflow instead).
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  Yes comments about the content should be solicited, and also questions like "then how can I do this...". In other words a FAQ section for each page would be great. Curated of course.
admax88q 6y ago
Remind me of webplatform.org another documentation project supported by multiple industry players. In the end everyone just went back to MDN.
- kaycebasques 6y ago
  > This is not a new docs platform: Open Web Docs is instead working closely with existing platforms, and its current priority is contributions to MDN Web Docs. https://web.dev/open-web-docs/ https://web.dev/open-web-docs/ Disclosure: I work on web.dev
galaxyLogic 6y ago
Does this give me a tool I can use to write my own documentation?
Jyaif 6y ago
Apple and Amazon are unsurprisingly absent: For Apple the web is a nuisance at best, and Amazon just never contributes back.

323 points by kylealden 6y ago

That is great news! Thank you Florian, Robert, and everybody involved.

Had to click through a few links to get real info. From https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/updates/introducing-open-web-docs https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/updates/introducing... > Questions and answers > Q: Is this a new docs platform? > A: No, we are working closely together with existing platforms, and our current priority is contributions to MDN Web Docs. > Q: Is this a competitor/replacement for MDN Web Docs? > A: No. Open Web Docs writers contribute to important developer documentation resources, including MDN. Mozilla is a part of Open Web Docs and a member of its Steering Committee. > Q: How is Open Web Docs funded? > A: Open Web Docs is funded by contributions from our founding sponsors Coil, Google and Microsoft, and contributors from the wider developer community such as Igalia. We welcome more backers who want to ensure support for long-term maintenance of web platform technology documentation.

dang 6y ago
This comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913083, but because the article it links to is clearly the more informative one, we merged that thread into this submission. Thanks for pointing that out!

arrayjumper 6y ago

Wow, was checking out the transactions at https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/transactions?offset=30 https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/transactions?offset... and I see that Google and Microsoft have collectively contributed $500k. Happy to see that there is corporate sponsorship for this. Gives me some hope that this will allow MDN to outlast any eventuality that might befall Mozilla.

tgv 6y ago
Or as The Reg called it: “Google, Microsoft pitch in some spare change to keep Mozilla's Web Docs online bible alive. Turns out having coherent API documentation is useful for, well, everyone” https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/
- cpeterso 6y ago
  Headline is correct: https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/
input_sh 6y ago
And a small Coil, who you've probably never heard of before, donated 40% of Google's/Microsoft's amount ($100k). That's pennies to Google/Microsoft. For Coil.com on the other hand... For the unaware, Coil is a subscription service that you pay a certain amount to, and that amount gets spread through websites you visit that have a WebMonetization tag in the <head> element: <meta name="monetization" content="crypto-address-here"> Pretty cool initiative. My personal website earned a total of $1 from it so far.
- mike-cardwell 6y ago
  I've come across this before. In order to receive money, I should just be able to put: <meta name="monetization" content="bitcoin:my-bitcoin-address"> Or similar, on my website. Doesn't work that way though. I have to sign up with somebody like coil.com and put an address they give me on my websites. This is just worse. Much much worse than it needs to be.
  - ahopebailie 6y ago
    That's where the idea started but that means the user has to be able to send Bitcoin. The purpose of Interledger is to abstract away that issue which is why Web Monetization is built on Interledger. You don't have to sign up with Coil to earn. There are other wallets that are on the Interledger network such as Uphold and Gatehub that can give you a payment pointer to put into your site's HTML. If you want your earnings to be converted to BTC that's possible I think.

pm90 6y ago

Hmm, can someone TLDR what this is supposed to be? I did read the article but I didn't understand what this is trying to do. It just mentions something about the "collective health of something".

hayksaakian 6y ago
it's a separate legal entity, independent of Mozilla intended to document the web. It seems like they're going to 'own' MDN from a funding perspective among other future proejcts my short summary is: Mozilla is spinning-off MDN into a separate entity that separate entity may attracting funding and donations that wouldn't normally contribute to Mozilla for various reasons in the same amounts
- ksec 6y ago
  >Mozilla is spinning-off MDN into a separate entity They should have just put this as headline instead. Sigh.
  - hayksaakian 6y ago
    it's ambiguous, because technically Mozilla could retain ownership of MDN but delegate maintenance to this new entity.
danaliv 6y ago
I didn’t get it either at first. But MDN Web Docs is Mozilla’s (very good, IMHO) web developer documentation site. Open Web Docs is apparently some kind of foundation/organization to collaborate on web documentation with other industry folks so it’s not held in just one company’s hands. (Take this with a grain of salt. I’m still only half-sure I get it.) ETA: hayksaakian succeeded in saying what I was trying but failing to say. :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
6y ago

user3939382 6y ago

Firefox pings Mozilla's servers unnecessarily when it launches regardless of the strictest telemetry or privacy settings, including those buried in about:config. I want Firefox to launch to a blank tab and emit 0 connections until I explicitly initiate a connection event through the UI, whereupon I want the connections to be directly associated with my UI interactions. Without that, Mozilla can track my usage of Firefox which I do not want, anonymized or otherwise. Until that is accomplished, which would be very easy for Mozilla, I don't care one lick about their new initiatives. Until this is fixed they are fraudulently peddling misleading privacy claims to users.

cornedor 6y ago
Is there currently a "modern" browser that does that?
- 22c 6y ago
  I believe Watefox and Tor Browser both have this functionality removed from the Firefox codebase. I am not sure about Pale Moon or Basilisk, but I suspect they may also have less telemetry.
Jonnax 6y ago
Compile Firefox yourself and remove that functionality?
laurent92 6y ago
What most annoys me about Mozilla is literally the quantity of advertising. - They open front pages to advertise about privacy and how much they respect it, - And when you’ve closed all of that, they do advertising (last one was for MLK) in new tabs, - And they’ll even pursue you by email to tell you how good they are, even though I specifically untick subscribe boxes everywhere I can. It is literally Big Brother going through every channel to tell you how much Big Brother cares about you !
httpsterio 6y ago
This comment isn't really relevant to this topic though, I don't think it's a good idea to bring every single Mozilla related gripe you have into a thread that is only semi-relevant.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

teruakohatu 6y ago

I don't understand why Mozilla cannot see that MDN should be part of their core mission. I can understand spinning off Thunderbird and Sunbird, but this really seems a big step in the wrong direction. Today their Mission webpage[1] states : "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." According to the Wayback Machine, 8 years ago that page[2] said: "Our mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet." Surely documenting open standards and educating developers is part of both the current mission just as much as the almost decade old mission? Along with the "Internet Society" (.org) I can't think any of any other organizations that are, in my opinion, so misguided as they are critically important to the future of the free internet. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120331122341/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120331122341/https://www.mozil...

musicale 6y ago
MDN is awesome; it's the Mozilla "product" that I use most often (though I do use Firefox as a secondary browser and Firefox focus as a junk content blocker) and I definitely include it in the "best of Mozilla" category.
jimmont 6y ago
Can you explain what makes this seem to be out of sync with this mission focus as you've emphasized? My read of this is their interest in expanding the existing effort somehow, focused initially on MDN. Separate from this doc effort I've wondered why Mozilla hasn't emphasized business opportunities around communications like VPN services, etc until recently as it overlaps with their mission, expertise and appears to be a legitimate business opportunity at scale. It's not my area of knowledge, only a speculation from some observation.
- wegs 6y ago
  I kinda feel like there ought to be some coherent effort to archive all this documentation, beyond archive.org (perhaps in collaboration with?). Good developer docs have source code, and are often interactive (you can play with code in a sandbox). Much of that stuff is either on personal web sites and blogs (often with unknown licensing) or behind corporate paywalls. There ought to be a place this stuff goes, and is forever archived, searchable, and usable. I'd actually extend that beyond software too. Educational materials. Service manuals for my car or vacuum cleaner. There's lots of stuff which ought to live forever for the benefit of humanity. And perhaps software itself. I ought to be able to pull up Netscape 2.0 or Flash and run it in a sandbox. Archive.org is designed to archive everything on the web. I'm thinking something thoughtful and deliberate where people (even paying for it) stick content into a permanent archive. If I'm running a startup, and I'd like to give you a guarantee of long-term support, I stick my support materials there, and they can outlast me. Hmmm... That was a bit rambling and not too crisp, but perhaps someone can think of ways to make it crisp?

franciscop 6y ago

It retracts from the credibility of a documentation platform that the blog post announcing it makes one of the most basic mistakes of writing text online; line length should be kept to 60-80 characters to make it readable. It can be stretched a bit up to 100 chars depending on font-size, line-height, etc, but this blog post features a whooping 163!

gnomewascool 6y ago
> that the blog post announcing it makes one of the most basic mistakes of writing text online Your comment is a valid criticism of the Open Collective website (if you at all feel like it, please send it directly to them — see the bottom of the webpage), but it's not the fault of the "Open Web Docs" project. They probably have little more influence on the design of the website than somebody using indiegogo, patreon or kickstarter has on the respective platforms.
- franciscop 6y ago
  From the wording, naming and UI I thought that Open Collective itself was introducing this project!
- piamancini 6y ago
  Hi - Pia from Open Collective here. Thanks for the ping on this. We deployed a quick fix to reduce the width and we'll look at it with more time.
piamancini 6y ago
Hi Francisco - Pia from Open Collective here. Thanks for the ping on this. We deployed a quick fix to reduce the width and we'll look at it with more time.
- franciscop 6y ago
  That's much better and more readable! Thanks for the super-quick fix!

ecmascript 6y ago

Great stuff but honestly I think this is a mistake: > Q: Is this a new docs platform? > A: No, we are working closely together with existing platforms, and our current priority is contributions to MDN Web Docs. The web needs another platform for this, Mozilla can't be trusted.

callahad 6y ago
> The web needs another platform for this, Mozilla can't be trusted. You don't have to trust Mozilla. All written MDN content is licensed as CC-BY-SA-2.5, and all code snippets are either CC0 or, for snippets over a decade old, MIT. And it's all in Git: https://github.com/mdn/content https://github.com/mdn/content So if the Web as a whole ever completely loses faith in Mozilla's ability to sustain the MDN platform, all of the content is licensed in such a way as to make it trivial to fork. There was even an attempt at spinning out the docs ~8 years ago (https://webplatform.org/ https://webplatform.org/), which ultimately collapsed back into MDN.

sradman 6y ago

Microsoft's description of the project [1]: > Open Web Docs, a new collective which is dedicated to sustainably supporting high-quality, browser-agnostic, community-driven web developer documentation. Open Web Docs employs full-time writing staff to support the development and maintenance of web developer documentation, independent of any one vendor or organization. [1] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/01/25/welcome-open-web-docs/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/01/25/welcome-open-...

amelius 6y ago

I hope the actual documentation contains a comment section (so we can discuss the material where it makes sense, and not e.g. on stackoverflow instead).

galaxyLogic 6y ago
Yes comments about the content should be solicited, and also questions like "then how can I do this...". In other words a FAQ section for each page would be great. Curated of course.

admax88q 6y ago

Remind me of webplatform.org another documentation project supported by multiple industry players. In the end everyone just went back to MDN.

kaycebasques 6y ago
> This is not a new docs platform: Open Web Docs is instead working closely with existing platforms, and its current priority is contributions to MDN Web Docs. https://web.dev/open-web-docs/ https://web.dev/open-web-docs/ Disclosure: I work on web.dev

galaxyLogic 6y ago

Does this give me a tool I can use to write my own documentation?

Jyaif 6y ago

Apple and Amazon are unsurprisingly absent: For Apple the web is a nuisance at best, and Amazon just never contributes back.