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Comment by atopal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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!

> 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.

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.

Huh, thanks for the explanation.

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

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