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Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN
- edward 5y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30711915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30711915
- cies 5y agoDeath 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 5y agoBecause 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 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.
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoTo be fair, that seems to be a copy of the page from more than 10 years ago (note the "Copyright 1999-2009" in the footer). The current website still seems to be run by the same company but looks much more modern.
- cies 5y agoYou are probably right. I just Google'd for "Refnes Data" (the name I found on the w3schools page) and this was the first hit. I checked again but did not find a more modern site anywhere. Did you?
- jasonlotito 5y agohttps://www.w3schools.com/about/default.asp https://www.w3schools.com/about/default.asp
- cies 5y agoThat's about w3schools (a product) not the company behind it.
- NavinF 5y agoPersonally I found that page and photo to be adorable and it improved my overall impression of w3shools from “an acceptable target of ridicule” to “aww, they’re trying their best even if they’re a bit clueless”. If HN allowed embedded media, you can bet there would be a headpat animation in this comment.
- black_puppydog 5y ago> improved my overall impression of w3shools from “an acceptable target of ridicule” to “aww, they’re trying their best even if they’re a bit clueless” Funny how that works, huh? Here's a pertinent rule that some^Wall here may^Wshould have seen before: > Remember the human https://www.britannica.com/topic/netiquette https://www.britannica.com/topic/netiquette
- NavinF 5y agoFacts. This isn’t the first time I learned my hatred was irrational.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ivanche 5y agoNot to defend w3schools but it seems you linked to some very old version of their site. This is the current About page: https://www.w3schools.com/about/default.asp https://www.w3schools.com/about/default.asp
- luke2m 5y agoEvery page is an .asp file.
- onion2k 5y agoI 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?
- syshum 5y agoThe 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
- jefftk 5y agoThis article is about how they are not going for the Wikipedia approach. Instead of articles primarily being written by volunteers, they will mostly be written by paid techwriters at Open Web Docs.
- jasonlotito 5y agoPeople don't read articles silly. They are going to complain that if they could contribute money to this, they would contribute so much extra money, but they can't because Mozilla takes it. Despite the article literally covering this very issue. Just read the comments here. And I'm willing to be they find a way to blame Mozilla for that ignorance.
- Angostura 5y agoI was under the impression that the W3Schools content had actually improved quite a bit over the last couple of years. No?
- archerx 5y agoIt has and he is talking from a place of total ignorance.
- o_m 5y agoYou can blacklist w3schools by using ublacklist: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist There are also lists for blacklisting github and stackoverflow content clone sites.
- archerx 5y ago"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.
- cies 5y agoYou do you. I find MDN so much better that I hope they soon push w3schools off their first-hit-throne. > Either you are completely out of touch or you're going to need to show some of the "low quality" examples from w3schools. Do you really need me for that? Here are "div" and "table" on both. https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_table.asp https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_table.asp https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/div https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/table https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ta... To me the difference is enormous (quality of writing, completeness, correct use of words, ads, noise on the page). But again: see for yourself. Now read back yous comment and see if your "What kind of logic is that?" and "I don't like something so no one should use it!" were reasonable sentences to throw at me.
- jka 5y agoBoth seem fairly high quality to me, after reading the comments and viewing the pages from each site in comparison. I remember using w3schools to learn HTML probably about twenty years ago now, and the content hasn't changed much since then. MDN appears to have gone through two major transitions within the past year. Whether those qualities are good or bad depend on your perspective; whether one of them ranks above the other in terms of SEO depends on the algorithms used by the search engine in question.
- archerx 5y agoI still prefer the w3schools version, I feel like it is better because it is concise and get straight to the point without a ton of blah blah, if I want an encyclopedic type of reference (which is rare) I go to mdn, but most of the times I just need quick reference that gets to the point immediately. Also I forget the internet has ads, don't you have ublock origin installed? Yes, they were totally reasonable sentences to throw at you because you want something to fail because of your subjective opinion disregarding if anyone else might find that something useful, it seems a bit solipsistic. I'm not saying mdn should be blocked, I'm saying I'm happy both exists, do you see the difference?
- asiachick 5y agoI'm often disappointed witu mdn as well. Lots of old examples using dated JavaScript passing on bad practices
- wbamberg 5y agoI agree. We are always trying to improve this but it's a huge task as MDN is such a big site. If you could please file issues (or PRs :) when you find bad practice examples, it would help.
- drdec 5y agoI always just add mdn to the search criteria if it's a search related to web technologies.
- dgb23 5y agoMDN is the single best resource/reference for web development. In DDG you can search directly there from your browser search bar by typing “!mdn”.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoThis “division of labour” is ironic, as Mozilla fired many of its staff including a lot of its MDN staff.
- vanderZwan 5y agoYeah, I'm kind of wondering if I should read "externalizing costs" between the lines or not.
- toyg 5y agoIt's not ironic - gotta make space in the budget for exec salaries by cutting a bunch of low-paid folks. Capitalism at work, baby!
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThey had two high paid execs and cut that in half before cutting any "low-paid" folks.
- toyg 5y agoAfter strenuously opposing it for three years, in which Baker alone made something like $5-6m, and only because it had become a talking point in media. They still make a cool half million on average - I understand that's small potatoes in SV, but in the great scheme of things it's still a lot.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoBeard stepped down roughly a year before the "Exec salaries ballooned while user rate dropped" Cal Peterson post became a talking point. And in the grand scheme of things, executive salary was never more than a few percent of annual spending.
- toastal 5y agoThe 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 5y agoI 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 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.
- jraph 5y agoActually one could use the latest on the edge modern web standards for this, but leverage graceful degradation so you still have documents that are both readable and comfortable in a browser supporting less things. If there is one set of standards that would allow that, it's the Web! This kind of documents should be perfectly readable in plain HTML without CSS and Javascript; Maybe MDN itself, directly, could be improved?
- idoubtit 5y agoInstead of creating a new tool to convert MDN's content into HTML, it would probably be easier to modify the official tool, Yari, in order to produce web page with more compatible (and faster) CSS & JS. https://github.com/mdn/yari https://github.com/mdn/yari But I don't think it would be useful unless MDN merges in the changes. My daily web browser struggles with the new MDN rendering unless JS is disabled. So I've lost a few features since the "design change", notably I cannot run the examples. Would I use a cloned site that's faster and where CSS&JS are more compatible? I would loose the external search I'm used to (DuckDuckGo !mdn), so using the clone would require a few changes on my side...
- montroser 5y agoI 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 5y agoThere 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.
- pbronez 5y agoThat’s kinda the point of TFA. Open Web Docs is funded by donations and works with MDN on the free-forever web focused content. MDN is part of Mozilla and just as lost in the woods as the rest of that organization. You can donate to Open Web Docs here: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs
- IshKebab 5y agoThat's because donations will never even remotely cover Mozilla's costs. They get something like $3m in donations. Wikipedia gets something like $120m. Mozilla's costs and Google income are like $400m.
- wejick 5y agoI really hope this will work for Mozilla. Supporting all works that make them more and more independent.
- ydlr 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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.
- ydlr 5y agoLol. Not intended at all. I just meant that the quality of the product doesn't impact their nonprofit work. It just needs to make a profit.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- maxloh 5y agoI 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 https://github.com/mdn/content/discussions/5901