Introducing Open Web Docs
opencollective.com
opencollective.com
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.
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">
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.
1. would show coil is getting quite a bit of money.
2. would show importance of MDN.
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.
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.
<meta name="monetization" content="bitcoin:my-bitcoin-address">
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see no evidence that Interledger can be used for receiving money without having to set up accounts or run software. Plenty of evidence to the contrary.
As I said before, to receive bitcoin from one of these systems, there is nothing I should need to do other than advertise my bitcoin address. Anything more than that, and the system sucks.
Correct.
What you want requires support in the user agent (web browser) though.
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.
And AFAIK OOXML isn't currently evolving as much as this Open Web.
> 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.
> 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-...
> 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.
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
They should have just put this as headline instead. Sigh.
(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. :)
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.
https://web.dev/open-web-docs/
Disclosure: I work on web.dev
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...
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?
Spinning off all their valuable products so they'll remain after their gone.
Web platform docs are surely important, but maintaining MDN is just a matter of funding at this point. If these new funding sources work just as well, what exactly is the problem?
Like it or not, Mozilla's continued existence hinges on Firefox's market share bringing in search engine deals. With their market share falling, the only things they can afford to spend their money on are 1) making their browser more competitive, and 2) building alternative revenue sources.
MDN docs maintenance is neither. It's certainly an asset to end users, but it's a cost center for Mozilla. It's good that other companies are stepping up to fund this. Somebody has to pay for our nice things.
> 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.
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.
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.