Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
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.
You can donate to Open Web Docs here: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs
This person alone receives around 1% of the budget.
> 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.
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).
Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for advertisement.
"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_Foundat...
And she said that while laying off 250 people, imposing a 100% discount on them and their families.
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.
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.
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.
They can't compare.
Wikimedia Foundation had a revenue of $157 million in 2021 and >550 staff and contractors.
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.
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.
People notoriously _hate_ both these group's approach to funding.
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.
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/
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.
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.
I checked again but did not find a more modern site anywhere. Did you?
If HN allowed embedded media, you can bet there would be a headpat animation in this comment.
Funny how that works, huh? Here's a pertinent rule that some^Wall here may^Wshould have seen before:
> Remember the human
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?
I have my doubts the quality will remain
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.
There are also lists for blacklisting github and stackoverflow content clone sites.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
> 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?
W3Schools writes: > The <div> tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document. From a semantic perspective this is not true or it's at least misleading. <div> does not define a section or division, that's what <section> or <article> is for.
The MDN article in contrast calls a div a "generic container" and has a disclaimer that says. > The <div> element should be used only when no other semantic element (such as <article> or <nav>) is appropriate.
And while W3Schools does not say "div is a cool box", they instead write "Any sort of content can be put inside the <div> tag!", which...yeah.
The point, as many others have offered in this thread but those set on hating W3Schools at all costs are determined to ignore, is that they provide a succinct explanation of web technologies for the relative layman. Its existence doesn't detract from MDN or any other resource, meanwhile it provides a demonstrable service. That seems like an odd crime to warrant strawmen attacks.
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!
"Seems"? Do you know that it is true, or are you guessing?
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.
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?
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...
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.
Now they just need to make Newman O's better. Aside from the mint ones, those are great.
For now, it is impossible to tell whether a given code snippet is licensed under CC0 or MIT.
Good luck using code from MDN.
In DDG you can search directly there from your browser search bar by typing “!mdn”.