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630 points sendilkumarn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.287s | source
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dend ◴[] No.30793342[source]
This is an interesting take on documentation - mainly because I fail to see the value proposition in paying for the functionality provided.

Speaking from my own experience:

- Notifications. I am not sure that I've ever needed to know when a doc is updated, because if there is anything radical coming on the market (or in a spec proposal), there are other avenues to find out about it.

- Collections. That is already a functionality in the browser that is not locked into just one documentation site.

- Offline mode. There is Zeal[0] if you like client-side software and devdocs.io[1] if you like browser mode.

Combine all that with the fact that it's just for MDN, and the appeal kind of disappears. YMMV, of course.

[0]: https://zealdocs.org/

[1]: https://devdocs.io/

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kaycebasques ◴[] No.30793450[source]
Re: notifications I think it's a smart move. Back when I was content lead for https://web.dev I was floating around ideas along the same lines. Web developers learn of great new feature X and are disappointed to learn that it's only supported on a single browser. They then forget about the feature for years even though in the meantime it has been implemented on all their target browsers. Notifications of some sort solves this problem. I agree however that whether people will pay for this feature is debatable. Browser vendors should be incentivized to provide this feature for free somehow because it's in their own best interest to increase adoption of new web platform features.
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1. dend ◴[] No.30793498[source]
Also, things like collections have been on sites like docs.microsoft.com[0] for some time. I find it somewhat odd personally to gate documentation-related features behind a membership fee, but I do not have full context on MDN product decisions or roadmap.

[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-node...