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630 points sendilkumarn | 1 comments | 24 Mar 22 16:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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chatmasta ◴[24 Mar 22 21:07 UTC] No.30795352[source]▶
Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this?

In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.

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1. cxr ◴[25 Mar 22 11:53 UTC] No.30800980[source]▶
> Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs.

Browser APIs change far less than the impression that most people have. (That impression is mostly the result of churn in what's fashionable on GitHub/Twitter this month, i.e. non-standards-based code from arbitrary projects that don't have anything to do with the browser except that they themselves are built to run in the browser.) Browser APIs are mostly cumulative.

The places where that isn't true are almost all experimental APIs. Arguably, these shouldn't be "advertised" within the reference to begin with—even before we ever consider the cost of keeping those pages up-to-date.