Hacker News Reader

Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> MDN used to stand for Mozilla Developer Network. Now it’s just MDN. I spent a few minutes looking on the MDN site to see if I could find any mention of the full name, but I guess they’re just all in on “MDN” now.

Huh, yeah, nerd-sniped on that one; I can't find anything either.

View on HN

We made that change around 2017. Mozilla Developer Network is somewhat ambiguous. In surveys and user interviews people were confused about the name. Web developers thought it might be a resource specifically for Mozilla developers, which to be fair was the focus in the earlier days. The web platform documentation was just one part of many Mozilla related things documented on MDN for some time. In 2017 though the web platform documentation had grown to make up 95% of MDN's traffic and it had become clear that it was not primarily a resource for Mozilla developers anymore, the name change to "MDN Web Docs" was intended to reflect that change in focus.

When the expansion of the first letter of an acronym becomes obsolete, I think it is a good opportunity to turn the acronym into a recursive acronym, e.g., MDN = MDN Developer Network.

This reminds me on the recursive XNA acronym which stands for “XNA’s not acronymed”.

Nice one! Thanks for sharing!

One of my most favourite recursive acronyms is XINU which stands for "XINU Is Not Unix". The delightful thing about this acronym is that "XINU" is also the reverse of "UNIX".

Upon a closer look, it turns out that for a given word W, a recursive acronym proclaiming that it is not W while simultaneously being the reverse of the word W, we need W to be of the form W = "?NI?" where each "?" denotes a distinct letter. Some fictitious examples:

* ANIL ⇒ LINA = LINA Is Not ANIL.

* KNIT ⇒ TINK = TINK Is Not KNIT.

Words of the form "?N?" also work if we are happy with a contracted "is" in the acronym. In fact we can get circular recursive acronyms in such cases:

* ANI = ANI's Not INA ⇔ INA = INA's Not ANI.

* ONE = ONE's Not ENO ⇔ ENO = ENO's Not ONE.

Both acronyms in each pair refer to each other thus making them circular while also being the reverse of each other! These could be useful names to express friendly banter between rival projects.

How about the classic "I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym..." ?

Wow! I was an avid reader of the XKCD comics about 15 years or so ago but I somehow missed this one. For others who are wondering what this is, here's the link to the relevant XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/917/

What is so clever about this phrase is that it naturally completes to a full sentence that contains itself as an acronym!

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym IS META!

A wonderful tribute to Hofstader's books that are full of such fascinating self-references.

That's Acronymiquine.

Ah, good ol'e Dr Comer. Back in school I worked on a project rewriting XINU in Rust. It was quite difficult in the early days of Rust, but it was a fun project to get insight into how XINU worked.

Also, EINE = EINE Is Not Emacs, and its successor ZWEI = ZWEI Was Eine Initially.

Or GNU which is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!"

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU#Name

or instead of being a troll, you could just remove the pointless extra letter:

DN = Developer Network

a) I bet you're no fun at parties.

b) That would be way to ambiguous and imply this is the only/main developer website when it's just relevant for web developers.

This is a super interesting anecdote, considering the name definitely confused me at the time - trying to learn web development with no context I did indeed think it was some kind of Mozilla-centric resource. All those times using w3schools over MDN are, in hindsight, a little sad aha.

Not as much as the names ExpertsExchange.com and PenIsland.com confused me!

I was always surprised that the browser oligopoly together with the W3C already had started building a site for web platform docs - webplatform.org - and then just mothballed that in favour of MDN. Seemed weird.

Snapshot: https://webplatform.github.io

Is that supposed to be for all the browsers? I always thought it was specifically for chrome and sponsored just by google. But maybe the bias towards chrome is part of why MDN became more prevalent.

Scrolled through few articles and it feels as useless restyled copy of w3schools or a similar site. Which are already less useful than MDN.

> Mozilla Developer Network is somewhat ambiguous

MDN is less ambiguous?

Yeah. MDN is just a name, you learn what MDN means and you know it, like you learned what Apple means or what Windows means. "Mozilla Developer Network" sounds more like a description that you're supposed to interpret the meaning of, and one natural interpretation is the network for Mozilla developers, and another is that it's a network for people developing for Mozilla platforms, maybe to do with Firefox add-ons.

I'd maybe call it "misleading" more than "ambiguous" but meh.

> you learn what MDN means

"What's MDN stand far?" "Mozilla Developer Network"

That's the point: it doesn't.

I mean, even if you are not aware of that and you start wondering what MDN is an acronym for, that’s the obvious result to arrive at?

And so what? It's not like they can fix the fact that there are old websites with outdated information on them, so people who are looking for what MDN means will find some outdated sources, yeah. Changing an initialism to a proper name takes time, that's not surprising.

It is easier to displace than destroy previous meaning. Thers what backronyms are for.

Huh, thanks for the explanation.

I always understood it by analogy with MSDN so it wasn't confusing to me at all.

This change happened right about August 15, 2017... which I know only because somehow I happened to notice at the right moment where the branding had been updated but the page <title> had not. Here's the bug report I filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1390381

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brings-microsoft...

I like calling these "anachronyms," because they're sort of like anachronistic acronyms (yes, fine, this one's _technically_ an initialism). I wrote a blog post[0] about them.

[0]: https://simpsonian.ca/blog/anachronyms/

ARM might be another good one. Acorn computers don't even exist anymore.

It’s no longer even an acronym, the official name is now Arm.

That's what I mean - that's how the parent defined an "anachronym". But yeah, there was that transitional phase where they first just redefined the acronym.

But also, even later they got rid of the all-caps (at least mostly). It went from an acronym of nothing to just a word.

Isn't it "Arm" because it's British and Brits typically write pronounceable acronyms in proper noun case (e.g. "Nato" vs. "UN")?

No, that's a media/journalist thing, companies themselves can do whatever. As far as I could tell (I worked at A(RM|rm) at the time, but not on this, no particular inside knowledge or anything) it may as well just have been to get people to stop saying 'ay-ar-em', since it was already not an acronym as said up thread; just a branding change, font change. In fact to your point in particular no you can tell it's not that, because note the 'a' is also lower case in the logo and anything styled.

Sun Microsystems - came from Stanford University Network Apple's Siri, came from SRI - Stanford Research Institute

Oh I'm definitely going to start using that name.

> yes, fine, this one's _technically_ an initialism

From the wikipedia article on acronyms[1], an initialism is a kind of acronym.

There are some definitions that specify that it must be pronounced as a word, although in common usage acronym includes initialisms , and what iteans to be "pronounced as a word" is kind of imprecise anyway. Is CIA pronounced as a single word, but the pronunciation comes from the pronunciation of the letters? I'd argue that it a single lexeme at least.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

Wikipedia calls these "orphan initialisms", with a couple of citations (halfway down the page for Acronym): "an existing acronym is redefined as a non-acronymous name, severing its link to its previous meaning." But yours is catchier.

Oh, I see they have "anacronym" too, with a fine distinction of meaning. It's the difference between the word officially ceasing to stand for anything, and the public generally forgetting the word stands for.

There's a couple of mentions of it in side pages and in example code, but that's all I can find:

> will soon be a proud part of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/mdn-observatory/ (posted 25 October 2023)

> Their brilliant but offbeat idea grew into today's Mozilla Developer Network

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/At_ten (last modified 25 January 2024)

> const heading = <h1>Mozilla Developer Network</h1>;

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

I remember a few years ago that Microsoft docs started to point to Mozilla docs, maybe part of Edge rebrand? Perhaps renaming to MDN during this agreement could leave someone like "huh is it M(ozilla)DN or M(icrosoft)DN??". I have no clue.

But M(icrosoft)DN was MSDN.

Obligatory Wikipedia article[0].

For the curious, MSDN is now called Microsoft Docs.

To the surprise of many, much of the documentation on the site is also open-source[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Developer_Network [1]: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs

Your information is a little out of date, Microsoft Docs became part of Microsoft Learn, so MSDN is actually now Microsoft Learn, or part of it at least.

What's the surprise about documentation being open source? The overwhelming majority of the source is going to consist of the text of the documentation, which is open anyway.

This is the point in the discussion where I'll point out that .NET started out as ".NET Passport", e.g, what people now think of as a Microsoft Account.

See also Apple, who, after a relatively brief dalliance with the name iTools, rebranded its online service as ".mac".

Sigh...

I miss early Internet names like these, although I suppose the fact that the original dot com era didn't last and a bunch of early startups got wiped out - Pets.com, anyone? - gave it a stench that marketers were all too willing to run away from at the first possible opportunity.

.NET was terrible. .net already meant something else.

That’s a clever and thoughtful idea, but those responsible for branding at Microsoft would burn the entire place down if this was ever to be the case.

Searching for:

site:https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ "mozilla developer network"

yielded ~115 results on Google

It is mentioned by its old name in older blog posts, but there seems to have been a rebrand to just "MDN". For example, there's no explanation of what MDN stands for on the About page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/about

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs

Now you link it, I vaguely remember it being a big deal around the time they dropped Servo and load of Rust people left (/were made redundant?), both as part of a broader shakeup/refocusing.

Now it stands for the Mweb Developer Network

Mweb is the name of a South African ISP.

Interestingly, they were one of the very first ISPs that I can remember, certainly one of the, if not the, most advertised to consumers at the time and I think it is the only ISP which still exists today from those very early days.

I wouldn’t ever use them personally, an apt analogy might be that choosing them today is like choosing AOL in the US.

Mԍp Developer Network

Hint: check the blog posts. As recent as October 2023.

It's in the url bar.

No it isn't, there's no 'network' and the order is different, and that's not what's discussed anyway. Though I suppose if the URL really was mozilla.developer.network it would make it less interesting whether the pages ever spelled it or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com