Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-working-together-on-mdn/

by Vinnl • 4 years ago

198 97 4 years ago

hacks.mozilla.org

cies6• 4 years ago

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.

cies6• 4 years ago

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.

Liquid_Fire• 4 years ago

To 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.

NavinF2• 4 years ago

Personally 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.

ivanche• 4 years ago

Not 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

luke2m• 4 years ago

Every page is an .asp file.

onion2k• 4 years ago

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?

cies6• 4 years ago

I did not ask Google to change it, I just hope they will soon loose to MDN (which is currently the second).

syshum• 4 years ago

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

jefftk• 4 years ago

This 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.

Angostura• 4 years ago

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

archerx4• 4 years ago

It has and he is talking from a place of total ignorance.

o_m• 4 years ago

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

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

archerx4• 4 years 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.

cies6• 4 years ago

You 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_table.asp

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

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.

franga2000• 4 years ago

1. where did you see that logic? I can't see it in the comment

2. w3schools has surface-level tutorials that teach you the most basic use case of each feature. It's decent for teaching, hence the name. MDN on the other hand is a complete reference - it shows every possible way to use a certain feature in a standardised format. Not as beginner-friendly, but it's what professional web developers need. They are very different sites.

chrisweekly• 4 years ago

As someone who's done webdev for a living since 1998, I share the OP's distaste for w3schools -- they truly earned their notoriety as a low-quality, spammy, SEO-hacking parasite. It was so bad it inspired a large group of some of the biggest names in the field to push back with a site called "w3fools" that tried to set the record straight and steer the hapless masses away from w3schools. See eg https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.co...

Unfortunately, it seems w3schools has since managed to acquire the w3fools domain, and (facepalm, what the actual f**) have appropriated the original content to make it appear as if those famous anti-w3schools signatories have all changed their minds and now endorse w3schools (!) -- which might actually be libel? and is just another scandalous example of the shadiness at play.

A leopard doesn't change its spots. w3schools sucks. Steer clear!

asiachick2• 4 years ago

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

wbamberg• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

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

dgb23• 4 years ago

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”.

toastal2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

jraph2• 4 years ago

Actually 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• 4 years ago

Instead 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

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...

asiachick2• 4 years ago

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

Eduard• 4 years ago

Says more about NetSurf than MDN.

albedoa2• 4 years ago

Right? What a strange anti-endorsement.

toastal2• 4 years ago

An actual independent browser engine? It supports CSS2, and is slowly getting to new features. Compare this to the corporate-owned options of today.

lloydatkinson• 4 years ago

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

vanderZwan• 4 years ago

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

toyg2• 4 years ago

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!

boomboomsubban5• 4 years ago

They had two high paid execs and cut that in half before cutting any "low-paid" folks.

montroser• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

pbronez• 4 years ago

That’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

IshKebab2• 4 years ago

That'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.

boomboomsubban5• 4 years ago

You can contribute directly to Thunderbird, I often wonder if it's poor performance is one of the reasons similar things aren't tried with Firefox.

https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

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

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

brimble2• 4 years ago

Public Radio wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't also constantly run ads.

notriddle• 4 years ago

Also, Wikipedia is able to make so much money from just donations because their target audience is "literally everyone."

MDN has a smaller set of users, and the thing with running websites with user-generated content is that it scales up pretty well. MDN probably only costs about a tenth as much as Wikipedia to run, but has much, must less than a tenth as many users.

wolverine876• 4 years ago

The evidence says otherwise: They donate a lot to those organizations and use them heavily.

maccard• 4 years ago

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/

edward• 4 years ago

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

wejick• 4 years ago

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

ydlr2• 4 years ago

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.

strbean2• 4 years ago

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.

ydlr2• 4 years ago

Lol. 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.

maxloh• 4 years ago

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

Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

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