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Comment by bbx | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice initiative but only aimed at developers.

Only yesterday, I was browsing this page: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ (How to get involved with Mozilla). I'm a non-English web designer so I thought "Maybe I could help with something". I find this page more helpful than http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/ because it covers a lot of areas. Even if you're just a Firefox user with no web development/design knowledge, you can help spread the word, or translate stuff, or become a software tester.

Maybe "What can I do for Mozilla" could include these aspects and turn the website into a step-by-step wizard that would ask questions such as "What are you?" with these following options: developer/designer/writer/publisher/user for example.

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Agreed. I also dislike that I have to click a button (with text that probably isn't accurate anyway) to see the next result. A list of possibilities would be much preferred.

There's an alternate stylesheet for the page, but yeah, it's not very discoverable unless you like to read source code or have some extensions installed. In Firefox, one can switch the stylesheet with View > Page Style, don't know how about other browsers.

  <link title="Bird's Eye View" href="plain.css" type="text/css" rel="alternate stylesheet">

Amazing! I've been writing CSS for the last 6 years (as my job mainly), and I've never heard of alternate stylesheets. I wonder how many of them I've missed.

The only time I provided different styles for the same web page was by adding a class to the body tag, and modifying it using JavaScript.

This is quite probably the only time you've missed them. Seriously just not a feature that caught on (because of poor browser integration, and limited use cases)

Just found an extension for chrome that puts an icon in the url box next to the star icon if there's an alternate stylesheet:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/style-chooser/daod...

You are absolutely correct. The domain doesn't match the content right now, but I'm going to be running a sprint to fill it out with non-coding-related activities soon. You can see a prototype at http://www.joshmatthews.net/asknot/; I'm mainly lacking experts who can provide me with content and links.

If you would like to help out with the Firefox Health Report project, feel free to stop by #fhr in IRC.

You should put together a Get Involved wiki page and submit a pull request.

That is a good idea. I'll bring it up at the next meeting.

We are also hoping to do a design contest soon for people to play with the data and come up with new useful visualizations.

Maybe you should learn how to code then? Instead of asking for "simpler" positions. We got past the designer who can't do HTML but just Photoshop. It's time to get past the designer who can only do HTML but no scripting.

I know a ton of developers (whom you might call backend developers) that can do great design work with little effort. Especially with tools like SCSS and/or compass/bourbon.

I'm sorry, but this is a terrible response. Clearly this person's expertise is in web design, so why would you expect them to pick up an entirely new domain of knowledge when they're already able and willing to contribute web-design now?

Having somebody who has only just learnt how to code contributing to a massive codebase is in nobody's best interests. All this will do is increase the workload of the developers who have to review the potentially crap code and, on top of that, it removes a potential contributor from an area where they could contribute far more valuable resources in a domain in which they actually have experience.

Suggesting that the op picks up an additional skill in their spare time is fine, but not at the expense of being able to contribute in an area where they already clearly have experience.

Ugh. I'd say the knowledge is in the same area.

I'm sorry, it's really not. The state of design on the web is quite bad currently thanks to the number of developers who think design is easy and do it themselves. It's a 'you don't know what you don't know' thing.

What if a lawyer step forward wanting to help? Wod he need to learn how to code? Your comment is disrespectful. This person is asking for opportunities to help, and ou response is learn something valuable. As if design was not. Mozilla needs designers too. More so with the mobile OS looming on the horizon.

The span between software and design is small. The fact that you pull in lawyers in her shows me that you didn't really grasp what I said.

His point stands though. What if I want to help Mozilla but don't want to learn code/design? Clearly I won't be able to contribute to their core stuff, but maybe I can spread the word or donate or something.

The span between software and design is small.

You have managed to insult both programmers and designers with this statement. Yes, there are people who program and design. Yes, to some people its easy to go from one thing to the other. But neither skill is nowhere near each other.

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