[HN Gopher] Introducing Open Web Docs
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Introducing Open Web Docs
Author : kylealden
Score : 299 points
Date : 2021-01-25 17:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (opencollective.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (opencollective.com)
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| Eugeleo wrote:
| Hey, I respect your preference and mean the following question
| in good faith: _Why_ do you care for this?
|
| I can understand not wanting Facebook to watch your every step
| (specifically because they build your shadow profile and that
| can be uncomfortable), but not wanting to share anonymised data
| with developers, and with such a passion? I'd love someone to
| explain this to me.
| cornedor wrote:
| Is there currently a "modern" browser that does that?
| 22c wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Compile Firefox yourself and remove that functionality?
| laurent92 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]
| shmageggy wrote:
| Had to click through a few links to get real info. From
| 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 wrote:
| This comment was originally a reply to
| 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 wrote:
| Wow, was checking out the transactions at
| 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.
| rini17 wrote:
| Not much to be happy about here. The "Living standard" ensures
| that independent browser implementation from scratch is
| impossible. Even not from scratch, see MS Edge.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| How does the standard disallow independent browser
| implementations?
| rini17 wrote:
| Same as Microsoft's OOXML standard. There are independent
| implementations but not one is 100% compatible. Even if
| that complexity wasn't deliberate on MS's part, it's surely
| a welcome feature.
|
| And AFAIK OOXML isn't currently evolving as much as this
| Open Web.
| jefftk wrote:
| Impossible? Tell that to Flow: https://www.quirksmode.org/blo
| g/archives/2020/01/new_browser...
| rini17 wrote:
| Sounds like they have yet to implement the proverbial last
| 20% of features which is going to take 80% of development
| time.
|
| > Well, it can render and interact with Gmail quite well.
| It's pretty much perfect on a few sites we've targeted as
| focuses during development, but it struggles with many
| others.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| deweller wrote:
| This is a dream that the lightning network aims to one day
| fulfill.
| 3395810 wrote:
| What is the idea here? Open a channel with each website
| that I visit. Lockup the BTC that I will ever send them
| but only send it to them slowly each time I visit it.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Why wouldn't you open a single channel with a well-
| connected routing node, and use it for all your payments?
| deweller wrote:
| Yes. In reality, users would have a connection open with
| one or a small number of routing nodes.
|
| The end result is very cheap and quick funds transfers to
| any node on the network. This lightning network
| infrastructure would make micropayments feasible.
|
| Granted, there are still problems to solve. But this is
| the dream.
| ahopebailie wrote:
| 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.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| I understand that the person paying probably needs an
| account somewhere, so that payments can be batched
| together to reduce transaction fees.
|
| However, there's no reason for me to have an account
| _anywhere_ in order to receive bitcoin. All I need is a
| bitcoin address.
|
| I don't want to sign up with Coil, Interledger, Uphold,
| Gatehub, or any other random third party, in order to
| receive bitcoin. And there is zero reason why I would
| have to.
| jorangreef wrote:
| Except that Interledger is not a "random third party",
| it's a protocol: https://interledger.org/
|
| So that you can make payments to someone else regardless
| of whether they want to use Bitcoin or not.
|
| I believe Interledger is the right level of abstraction
| for this, in the same way that you wouldn't want your
| email server to have to know or code against the lower
| protocols, e.g. Ethernet or WiFi, but only IP, TCP and
| SMTP. This way your email server can EHLO any email
| server, regardless of the network topology or underlying
| protocols.
|
| Interledger does the same for payments.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| Ok, so my bitcoin address is
| "bitcoin:1PQLtWnjUi1itHLG6QCQeHM3Nxua8pRsq1". What tag do
| I put in my HTML in order to receive payment from this
| system, without having to sign up anywhere?
| dflock wrote:
| You can just put that there - and then you hope that user
| agents implement this - or you can use interledger.
| shaan7 wrote:
| Finally someone seems to have done this right. Subscribed
| now, lets see how it goes!
| StavrosK wrote:
| Same here, I tried it and liked it. I've made a few dollars
| too, it's early days but it looks very promising. I
| especially like the fact that the site can know you're paying
| an unlock articles, hide ads, etc for you, even though you're
| paying a few pennies per minute.
| initplus wrote:
| Honestly, committing 100k to this is probably a more
| effective marketing spend than many...
| efferifick wrote:
| Well... this is how I just found out about them. I find
| coil very interesting! Strongly thinking about becoming a
| member, but I would like to find out if the websites I
| follow use the web monetization tag first.
| input_sh wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, there are two ways of discovering
| that:
|
| 1. Start a one month subscription and browse your
| websites. The add-on changes colour depending on whether
| the current site is monetized or not.
|
| 2. Try to find them here: https://coil.com/explore. If
| you click on "blogs", there's a search bar that you can
| use.
|
| There's also a Twitter bot that tracks how many websites
| have it (https://twitter.com/WebMotized). Currently at
| 1400, with about a dozen of sites added weekly.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so did they actually donate or did they pay the monetization
| amount that their algorithm determined MDN should have?
| ahopebailie wrote:
| This was a straight donation. A thriving Web ecosystem of
| independent developers and creators building and hosting
| their own content is what gets us out of bed in the
| morning.
|
| Credit to Ali Spivak who kicked this all off and helped us
| realise what a crucial role good platform documentation
| plays and how important it is to fund good knowledgeable
| writers.
| input_sh wrote:
| Click on the parent link, filter by $5k or more, scroll to
| the bottom. They actually donated. MDN doesn't seem to have
| that meta tag.
| tleb_ wrote:
| Not sure if this is ironical. Either way, it is a donation
| as the MDN pages do not have a <meta name="monetization"
| ...> tag and the payment wouldn't go through OpenCollective
| which does not seem to support Web Monetization.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Pretty sure they donated, no need to doubt the donation
| like that.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Ok, I wasn't necessarily doubting the donation. I thought
| though that if they didn't donate but gave the money that
| their algorithm determined that it would be an
| interesting thing for several reasons:
|
| 1. would show coil is getting quite a bit of money.
|
| 2. would show importance of MDN.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I don't think that many people have the
| extension installed yet, but I can see them not requiring
| big sites to add a monetization header and just sending
| the money to them instead.
| ahopebailie wrote:
| We're working to make the Web Monetization API a standard
| that browsers can adopt natively:
| https://webmonetization.org
|
| The extension helps us bootstrap the ecosystem but a
| native integration is far superior. Check out Puma
| browser for an example of the integrated experience for
| mobile.
| tgv wrote:
| 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/
| cpeterso wrote:
| Headline is correct:
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/mozilla_web_docs/
| pm90 wrote:
| 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".
| chrisdavidmills wrote:
| I can try to clear this up (full disclosure: I work on the MDN
| team at Mozilla).
|
| Last year our team was downsized by a little below 50%. Most of
| the losses were in the writer's team. We only lost one
| engineer.
|
| As a result, our writing output was considerably smaller. To
| mitigate this, we did two things:
|
| 1. Mozilla hired some contractors to help keep the continuous
| web platform documentation updates happening, so MDN does not
| become out of date.
|
| 2. Mozilla plus Google, Microsoft, Samsung, W3C, Coil, and
| other supporters worked together to create Open Web Docs, which
| provides funding to hire more full-time writing staff to help
| MDN content keep getting better.
|
| Step 1 was really just getting MDN out of trouble, and back to
| stability. Step 2 is about letting us go further and start
| evolving MDN's content.
|
| MDN is staying inside Mozilla; we still contribute a lot to MDN
| in terms of engineering, infrastructure, and writing costs. It
| is just that we now have OWD contributing to writing costs as
| well, to help safeguard the content.
|
| This is a good thing -- it allows all the interested orgs to
| get together and agree on future content directions for MDN
| together, rather than just working away on it in our own little
| pockets. And we'll be developing a shared process to follow to
| make sure that all work is going in the right direction.
| dang wrote:
| This comment was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25913083, where the
| article was more of a press release. We merged that thread
| hither.
| hayksaakian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >Mozilla is spinning-off MDN into a separate entity
|
| They should have just put this as headline instead. Sigh.
| hayksaakian wrote:
| it's ambiguous, because technically Mozilla could retain
| ownership of MDN but delegate maintenance to this new
| entity.
| danaliv wrote:
| 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]
| franciscop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| From the wording, naming and UI I thought that Open
| Collective itself was introducing this project!
| piamancini wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's much better and more readable! Thanks for the super-
| quick fix!
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Does this give me a tool I can use to write my own documentation?
| FrontAid wrote:
| That is great news! Thank you Florian, Robert, and everybody
| involved.
| amelius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ecmascript wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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
|
| 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/), which ultimately collapsed back
| into MDN.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| 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/
|
| [2]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120331122341/https://www.mozil...
| musicale wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| bobajeff wrote:
| I suspect this is part of Mozilla pulling what Netscape did at
| the end of their life.
|
| Spinning off all their valuable products so they'll remain
| after their gone.
| admax88q wrote:
| Remind me of webplatform.org another documentation project
| supported by multiple industry players. In the end everyone just
| went back to MDN.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > 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/
|
| Disclosure: I work on web.dev
| sradman wrote:
| 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-...
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