[HN Gopher] Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN
___________________________________________________________________
Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN
Author : Vinnl
Score : 186 points
Date : 2022-03-18 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hacks.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hacks.mozilla.org)
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| This "division of labour" is ironic, as Mozilla fired many of its
| staff including a lot of its MDN staff.
| toyg wrote:
| 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!
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| They had two high paid execs and cut that in half before
| cutting any "low-paid" folks.
| toyg wrote:
| After 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 wrote:
| Beard 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Yeah, I'm kind of wondering if I should read "externalizing
| costs" between the lines or not.
| [deleted]
| maxloh wrote:
| 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
| montroser wrote:
| 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.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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/
| lucideer wrote:
| Thunderbird is a separate and entirely voluntary project
| that Mozilla don't manage.
|
| But even apart from Mozilla's lack of involvement, it's
| also a wildly different - and so incomparable - product
| (local email in a webmail dominated world, compared to a
| browser in a browser dominated world).
|
| Thunderbird would absolutely be worse off if they didn't
| have that (great, well organised) facility.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Same I contribute too, and seriously wish the same was
| setup for Firefox.
|
| I suspect the Thunderbird fund is not doing well because
| people assuming giving to Mozilla funds mainly technical
| work and most people don't know about Mozilla issues nor
| about the smaller direct funds like Thunderbird's.
| [deleted]
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| TBH they they could do a little more in regards of
| donating. For eg. I can very easily ask my government to
| donate 1% of my taxes to Wikimedia foundation, but Mozilla
| is not registered as such in my country.
| themihai wrote:
| Is a browser so expensive to maintain? $400m/year?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Mozilla management is so expensive to maintain.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Mozilla management is probably around 1% of the budget,
| more if you count middle management but I doubt you're
| discussing positions like those.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| "Mozilla CEO Increased Her Salary From 2.5 Million
| Dollars to Over 3 Million"
|
| This person alone receives around 1% of the budget.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| When she "increased her salary" she became the CEO
| seemingly without replacing her old role, becoming the
| only executive.
| zarzavat wrote:
| A web browser is some of the most complicated software in
| existence.
| RobertMiller wrote:
| It's worse than this. While money does not flow from
| Mozilla Foundation to Mozilla Corporation, the opposite
| is not true. A lot of the money that Mozilla Corporation
| manages to make is not spent on Firefox development, but
| is instead paid to Mozilla Foundation, ostensibly to
| license the Mozilla brand. The Foundation is actively
| holding Firefox back with this organizational scheme.
|
| > _For 2019, the Mozilla Foundation received $15,858,258
| per a trademark license agreement with Mozilla
| Corporation, allowing us to reinvest earnings from our
| products into advocacy and grant making that grow the
| internet health movement._
|
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/foundation/annualreport/2019/
| mch82 wrote:
| Of course.
|
| Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google,
| Microsoft, and Apple. Browsers are the most important
| software at those companies because most other software
| runs on them.
|
| The Hacker News community doesn't seem to appreciate the
| work Mozilla has done to establish web standards. I've
| experienced what it's like to be stuck with IE6 and IE11
| for a decade, holding back web projects at work. Firefox
| broke through that inertia and made Google, Amazon,
| Netflix and other companies possible. Essentially,
| Firefox made the whole "startup" wave Hacker News rides
| on possible (though much of that momentum transferred to
| the App Stores).
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google,
| Microsoft, and Apple."
|
| Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less
| pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for
| advertisement.
| AlphaSite wrote:
| Maybe 10-20% less, but it's not enough to meaningfully
| make a difference.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| 20% less would be already quite meaningful. Add to that
| volunteers who work completely for free, and this _could_
| give an edge and I would argue, that this is mainly what
| keeps firefox alive. Despite their management
| increasingly acting like a ordinary company.
|
| "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in
| compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400%
| payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox
| marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she
| stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount
| to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were
| paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount
| to ask people and their families to commit to." "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foun
| dat...
| diggernet wrote:
| > That's too big a discount to ask people and their
| families to commit to.
|
| And she said that while laying off 250 people, imposing a
| 100% discount on them and their families.
| mch82 wrote:
| From another point of view, our society has major market
| inefficiencies around resource allocation that we need to
| figure out. As a society, we absolutely need a free and
| open web (modern telecommunications). We also need other
| things like agriculture, energy, medical tech,
| sanitation, transportation, and education. Yet we pay
| people the most to work on ad tech. This is a major,
| generational problem.
|
| Edit: I think we may be starting to figure this out.
| Google is slowly starting to charge for more services.
| Even Facebook is looking to introduce paid products
| (Quest). People are also learning from Elon Musk how much
| wealth can be generated by working on major human
| problems like transport, energy, and space access.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| To work on an open source browser instead of apps yes,
| but how many people would take a significant pay cut to
| work on Firefox instead of Chrome?
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Maybe. I'm glad FF exists, am using it all the time on
| desktop.
|
| But here's another perspective: FF led an audience
| towards Google's web of shit. It would've been entirely
| possible for Moz to have said no to the latest fad; then,
| by the power of having a dominating browser in the field,
| the web could've been preserved as a medium for
| relatively simple text-mostly information. I, for one, am
| interested in individual info and personal sites rather
| than thousands of nice-looking content farms with
| tracking.
|
| I'm particularly puzzled by those CSS apologists always
| painting a naive creationist story about how much we
| progressed etc etc. Yet, realistically, CSS is so bad,
| like consider-your-career-choices bad, that I have a hard
| time accepting this as a result of so much energy of so
| many intelligent people. CSS will go down as this
| generation of web "developers" retire, since it's an
| irrational, overcomplicated piece of shit only
| understandable in discourse as it has happened. Why did I
| put "developers" in quotes? Because the web was a vision
| for easy good-enough self-publishing for layman, not an
| "industry".
|
| Saying this as someone who's a sucker for design, and
| sucks at it, too.
| strbean wrote:
| If a camel is a horse designed by committee, CSS is the
| product of 10 generations of camel breeding by different
| committees, followed by some rounds of competing evil
| geniuses creating genetically modified variants.
|
| We should also keep in mind that the use cases have
| completely and wildly changed.
|
| That being said, it does seem like we are overdue for a
| clean slate.
| tored wrote:
| The web was actually better in the days of IE6 than
| today.
| xcambar wrote:
| You're talking about the contents, GP is talking about
| the devices/engines.
|
| They can't compare.
| tored wrote:
| The limitations made the web better.
| mwid wrote:
| And much less secure.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ha can you even see through those rose-smothered
| spectacles?
| abbe98 wrote:
| I wonder how much of Mozilla budget is actually spent on
| Firefox.
|
| Wikimedia Foundation had a revenue of $157 million in 2021
| and >550 staff and contractors.
| pbronez wrote:
| 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
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If they just took a fundraising approach like how public
| radio and Wikipedia do
|
| People notoriously _hate_ both these group's approach to
| funding.
| notriddle wrote:
| 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.
| brimble wrote:
| Public Radio wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't _also_
| constantly run ads.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| They have to sometimes because the donations (sadly) aren't
| always enough
| brimble wrote:
| It's more than "sometimes", these days. They've long
| moved on from a quick "this program made possible by..."
| to straight up reading ads on air, frequently. Between
| that and all the time they spend promoting their own
| programs, _plus_ the pledge drives, I doubt their content
| /non-content time is any better than most commercial
| radio. Maybe worse.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The evidence says otherwise: They donate a lot to those
| organizations and use them heavily.
| cies wrote:
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| I was under the impression that the W3Schools content had
| actually improved quite a bit over the last couple of years.
| No?
| archerx wrote:
| It has and he is talking from a place of total ignorance.
| o_m wrote:
| You can blacklist w3schools by using ublacklist:
| https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
|
| There are also lists for blacklisting github and stackoverflow
| content clone sites.
| archerx wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| archerx wrote:
| I 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?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you don't want an encyclopedic reference, you can read
| the first section on MDN and move on. It's about as long
| and to the point as the w3schools article, and has all
| the rest of the content if you want to dig further.
|
| I don't think it should be blocked, but its content is
| almost always low quality, so it doesn't deserve the
| search rating it has. Its prominence is a strong symptom
| that search engines do not work very well.
| jka wrote:
| Both 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| archerx wrote:
| I see it as the opposite, if I'm going to learn a new
| feature, mdn would be the place to go to get a deep dive of
| what it does but once you understand it, w3schools is the
| place to go for a quick syntax and argument reference.
| Yaina wrote:
| MDN also has a bunch of tutorials[1], even for for various
| frameworks.
|
| I think the major difference is that W3Schools neglects to
| explain important concepts like what semantic html is and
| just says: "div is a cool box".
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Learn/HTML/Introduc...
| rainonmoon wrote:
| W3Schools' detractors do their credibility no favours
| with these spurious examples when claiming low quality.
| Nowhere do they say anything as reductive as "div is a
| cool box". Here's what they say about divs:
|
| > The <div> tag defines a division or a section in an
| HTML document.
|
| > The <div> tag is used as a container for HTML elements
| - which is then styled with CSS or manipulated with
| JavaScript.
|
| > The <div> tag is easily styled by using the class or id
| attribute.
|
| That's a succinct, factual description of its definition
| and basic functions. What's wrong with that?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 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/we
| b/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!
| [deleted]
| albedoa wrote:
| > Unfortunately, it seems w3schools has since managed to
| acquire the w3fools domain
|
| "Seems"? Do you know that it is true, or are you guessing?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Probably guessing. The site is still alive, but has been
| changed to say that W3Schools has cleanup up their act.
| https://www.w3fools.com/
| robin_reala wrote:
| Worth pinging a few of the original signatories on Twitter
| to get their take?
| asiachick wrote:
| I'm often disappointed witu mdn as well. Lots of old examples
| using dated JavaScript passing on bad practices
| cies wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > 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
| NavinF wrote:
| Facts. This isn't the first time I learned my hatred was
| irrational.
| ivanche wrote:
| 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
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| 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.
| cies wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| https://www.w3schools.com/about/default.asp
| syshum wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| People 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.
| drdec wrote:
| I always just add mdn to the search criteria if it's a search
| related to web technologies.
| luke2m wrote:
| Every page is an .asp file.
| onion2k wrote:
| _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?
| cies wrote:
| I did not ask Google to change it, I just hope they will soon
| loose to MDN (which is currently the second).
| Jarwain wrote:
| Recently MDN feels like it has been surpassing w3schools on
| more of my searches
| dgb23 wrote:
| 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".
| wejick wrote:
| I really hope this will work for Mozilla. Supporting all works
| that make them more and more independent.
| ydlr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ydlr wrote:
| 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.
| edward wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30711915
| toastal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jraph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| jraph wrote:
| Maybe you could setup a mdn search keyword in your browser
| (maybe even !mdn would be possible?) to minimize your habit
| change?
| asiachick wrote:
| I find the purple on black to be too low contrast for my eyes
| and setup.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-18 23:01 UTC)