Man these kind of views bother me so much. They’re taking one of the most (if not, most) useful documentation sources for cross platform web development that benefits them very little, and moving it to a system of open contribution so it can live past the company’s financial problems. And this is your first take?

Granted, it depends on how it turns out. But my first impression is that authoritative reference documents of MDN are going to become cluttered with comments and disagreements.

MDN has never been "authoritative reference documents". It's a wiki. Anybody can edit and republish pages, change examples, do whatever. I noticed somewhere about a year ago that it was a wiki, and have made minor changes to a couple of pages since then, when something was missing an example or something.

I change, I publish, it's done. And if my change was wrong, or opinionated, or bad, it's just like that until somebody else catches it and fixes it back.

Neither Safari, Chrome/Chromium, IE, old Edge, nor new Edge have substantial HTML and CSS developer documentation on their own web sites. Their vendors - excepting Apple and the WebKit contributors - all chose to work with Mozilla instead to put their docs on MDN: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/10/18/documenting-w...

It seems to me that as far as the browser makers are concerned, MDN is as close to authoritative as you can get without going to the standards documents themselves - and the standards don't give you browser compatibility matrices or make any note of browser-specific quirks.

MDN may be a wiki, but it certainly isn't treated like one by the people who are most interested in it being accurate and up to date.

I suppose I was reacting to this:

"Authoritative reference documents of MDN are going to become cluttered with comments and disagreements"

Which suggests previously authoritative docs are becoming less so due to being editable. I'm just pointing out they are and always have been subject to edits from the public. If anything the PR process will likely increase the reliability of the info because there would be a chance to do some vetting of changes.

I totally agree that MDN is as close to authoritative as you can get, but it's one (important) step away.

I think people put authoritative sources on too much of a pedestal because it's possible for someone to naively or maliciously edit wikis. People who write official docs are also frequently wrong, and the editing and review cycle there is far slower!

Every recent review I've seen of Wikipedia vs arbitrary big-a Authoritative sources has said that both have issues and overall Wikipedia is better.

I hope they don't suffer the same type of problem that caniuse has had since incorporating the MDN data. In that case, source data sets that were each well-regarded and, particularly in caniuse's case, well-curated on their own became overwhelming and harder to use than before once combined. The slightly different styles for each source and the partial duplication often seem to obscure the information I'm really trying to get to in the search results now. If MDN is now going to be community-led, I hope they manage to find some arrangement where there is still decent curation and not a Wikipedia/SO-style free for all followed by heavy-handed mod over-reaction.

Why is it now more likely to become cluttered than before?

I think you are both right. This is good for the future of MDN, but OTOH cutting cost is likely to be what motivated Mozilla to make this change.

They had already cut cost, I would phrase it as this change being now even more necessary.

With corporations, the cynical view is most likely to be the correct view. And I wouldn’t say MDN does very little for Mozilla; it’s the main part of their brand in developers’ mind share. If they want to have a browser without developers who like it, that’s their choice, but it won’t really work out well business wise.

As far as I can see, Mozilla have no reason to be losing money other than their own mismanagement.

This is an article about MDN, not Mozilla. How exactly does MDN bring money? Do you suggest MDN should be a revenue source? Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because?

This is seriously entitled. Mozilla gave us an amazing resource, entirely for free. This attitude isn't right, it's toxic and harmful.

Mozilla is in a spot of difficulty, and instead of taking a resource that is operating entirely at a loss down, they're taking the engineering steps to ensure thez resource can outlive them.

That their mismanagement caused them the difficulty is entirely irrelevant here. It could have happened in a myriad of other ways. We should be praising Mozilla and the MDN tech team for the steps they're taking in making sure the MDN can live on.

It's stuff like MDN that attracts donations.

Fun fact: I have an open source repo with millions of downloads, tens of thousands of active users, and, for at least a year, a prominently displayed donate button. How much in donations do you think it took in over its lifetime?

Hint: it's less than $200.

Donations don't really work.

Thanks for the vim plugin for vscode! It's quite useful and usable. fwiw i don't think you get many donations because it looks like an official microsoft backed vscode plugin so why would people throw money at microsoft. that said, i do think you are correct in that people in general do not donate to open source individually that much.

We didn’t have many for Firebug either, though we appreciated those we got and funneled them to new contributors living outside the States where it made a difference.

>for at least a year, a prominently displayed donate button.

Just to be sure, are you referring to the "BuyMeCoffee" button on the GitHub page for the extension (https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim)?

Nah, we used to have a more prominent link. It's been removed since I stopped developing on the extension.

At the bottom of a long scroll isn't something I'd consider prominent. I'd probably change it to simply "Donate" as a button, and put it with the badges at the top. Red, purple or orange as a contrasting color from the blue and green badges.

Which one is it? Maybe you will win a handful of donations here.

I guess its https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

> Or do you expect Mozilla to maintain the MDN for free eternally just because?

That's what I expect of a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining one of the last two remaining major browser engines, yes.

I didn't know that becoming non-profit meant that money is free :)

What are their revenue streams?

Now that antitrust is happening anyways, Google's main reason for shoveling money at them is going away.

Well, the way I see it it was the financial problems who personally made the decision, so that complicated things somewhat.

If the alternative is to close shop and let it die entirely, I don't have an issue with it

It's not like they were extremely profitable and fired people to squeeze an extra buck

Laying off people isn't inherently evil

I have more of a problem with who they laid off than the fact that they laid people off. I'm probably biased as an engineer, but IMO the people who actually create your products should be the last ones to be laid off, not the first. And if the company is struggling, highly paid execs should take a pay cut before you start laying off lower-paid engineers.

hey, firing people is hard work.

It's more the clear mismanagement of their finances on ill-considered products outside of their core offering that never go anywhere. Some of them appear to be nothing more than vanity projects that subsequently disappear having got no traction at all.

I still think they are/were in a great position to offer what is now office365 and google docs earlier on, with a position to offer both dedicated and cloud software options.

They had electron effectively a decade before electron with XULrunner and let it die on the vine.

There were opportunities for developer mindshare and for services adjacent to those tools they were already building... that they didn't do more for getting Thunderbird more competitive to Outlook to offering a better breed of messenger platform.

No, their management sat on fat cash, with fat paychecks and ill-conceived projects that lead to little in terms of mindshare or income longevity.

Managing is inherently risky –– we shouldn't expect managers to make no mistakes while at the same time expecting them to keep workers around in an unprofitable business would only serve to further harm the business

Sure, one can rant all one wants about management's lack of business acumen, but that's completely separate from the issue of the layoffs

I read it more as they cleaned up the contribution process so that it's easier for people to participate.

But if what you said does happen, then RIP. It's not going to be the same - everyone is too busy writing medium articles to sell their course on udemy to make real contributions for free.

There were a lot of useful guides showing practical applications of features beyond just listing the api spec.

But I guess it'll still be useful as a more approachable wiki to api standards rather than having to go to w3schools (yuck) or the horrible ui of w3c.

Nevermind that work on Yari started at least a year prior to the layoffs in question. https://github.com/mdn/yari

So, you want to use it for free, but whoever makes it to be paid by someone else?