Can we remove the old and out-of-date JavaScript framework articles from Learn web development? #827
Replies: 3 comments 3 replies
-
|
Strong +1 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I agree with the plan @chrisdavidmills - as already discussed directly with you, we're currently pulling all our metrics together on the content side. This is work that should be complete in Q4 and I would really like to hold off on the removal until this is in place, so we can understand the impact. I'm hoping we'll be able to move forward with this by the end of the month 🤞 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks, @Rumyra, this all sounds good to me. It is essential to have analytics in place and to understand the impact before proceeding with such removals. I'll hold off for now and look forward to seeing more progress on this. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Is the "probably" here a doubt you have or are you saying that depends on how the reader approaches it? If the first: input of knowledgeable people about those frameworks seems required, can't you ask the creators directly how they feel about it? (I hope the maintenance nightmare has not severed that possibility) If the second: I think the disclaimers are good enough and that the readers will approach the material with caution and appreciate that an outdated material is still made available. In other words, I would assume that if the material is available it is because both the central ideas are applicable and the API didn't changed drastically since publication. As anecdote: when learning React in 2024 I highly appreciated some well written (and even some not so well written) Introductory texts written in 2020 (I just checked how old the texts were). |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
@aszasz The "probably" is because I am assuming they are going to do more harm than good, but I don't know for certain in all cases. In my mind, a five-year-old tutorial for a JS framework is probably going to be out-of-date enough to be frustrating to follow, especially for inexperienced developers. They should be able to trust our material to help them learn the concepts, without also being expected to look up what's changed so they can get the thing working on top of that. (Although, granted, dealing with such frustrations is all part of the web developer's day-to-day!)
The maintenance nightmare is not based on any ill will between us and the original writers. It is based on the fact that for this Learn section to do its job, it doesn't really need to cover more than one framework. It is supposed to teach frameworks in general, not multiple frameworks. It would be far easier, maintenance-wise, to just link to the other framework's own beginners docs.
Yeah, there is probably still some value in them, but I'm not sure if it outweighs the frustration that the outdated bits are likely to cause. It all hinges on the amount by which the API has changed since publication. It is worth looking into, in each case. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
MDN documents the web because no one does it as good as us—there are no "first party docs" for most web features other than the spec. We have learning docs because we can piggyback on our already top-notch reference docs. However, we lose all our comparative advantages when documenting specific libraries, because we are directly competing with the official docs. We neither have unique resource advantages nor the expertise or timeliness of first party docs. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
-
In the Learn web development content, we have the JavaScript frameworks and libraries core module. This works pretty nicely, giving an introduction to frameworks in general and what they are used for, before diving into React and showing the reader how to use it to build up a real-world example. Our aim is not to provide an exhaustive guide to React or any other framework, just to give readers an introduction to frameworks so they can then explore the topic more deeply on their own.
The issue is that I also hired people to create introductions to other frameworks, namely Ember, Vue, Svelte, and Angular: see Other framework choices. I wanted to show that React is not the only framework choice, but unfortunately, this has created a maintenance nightmare. The guides to the alternative frameworks are out-of-date (May 2020, Jan 2023, August 2020, and April 2021, respectively), meaning that they probably do more harm than good at this point.
I propose that we archive all these alternative framework docs, and replace them with a section explaining that there are other framework choices, and then linking to each framework's own set of beginner's docs.
Before I do this, I want to get other opinions, and we should probably also look at the page views for these articles to see what we would lose upon getting rid of them. I don't have access to this data, so I'd need someone from Mozilla to help me on this.
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions