835156 - Download a snapshot of MDN

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[KOLANICH]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Build ID: 20130116073211




Expected results:

What about to add downloading a snapshot of MDN.
Needed formats are chm, fb2, pdf and archived mhtml.
I need something like this
http://php.net/download-docs.php

Comment 1

[Sudheesh Singanamalla (:ShellHacker)]

This looks interesting, but a few things are unclear, Is this about keeping the whole MDN as a downloadable package that can be referred to offline ? If so .. How would that offline documentation keep up-to-date. Or have I got the whole thing about this bug wrong ?

Comment 2

[KOLANICH]

yes, i mean downloadable packages for offline reading. the packages are updated either by cron or on article change (of course we should wait some time after last article edit because the editor can change it again to make a small fix).

Comment 3

[KOLANICH]

on client side it can be updated either manually or using a script when client is online.

Comment 4

[Sudheesh Singanamalla (:ShellHacker)]

CC: David Walsh

I really want to take on this bug or rather enhancement request but Would it be better to provide this feature as an external hack/web app rather than integrating it into the Kuma ? Also If we integrate it into Kuma, where shall we place the links and what would the links be doing ? I have a few things (3) we could do and a few explanations, suggest appropriate, requesting mentor ship.

[1] Would they scrape through all the files and put all HTML files in a folder and then zip it up ?

=> This has its pros and cons, The pro being the fact that after every click request thats made the latest updates of the wiki pages are taken as downloads. The con is the amount of load that'd be placed on the servers and at the same time it'd be a slow process.

[2] Place all the content manually into different compressed folders and keep them as downloadable packages.

[3] Only provide the tiny relevant things like the information in these pages as offline documentation either all as one package or as separate packages of documentation download or both.
[3.1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element
[3.2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference

Comment 5

[KOLANICH]

[1] this
there can be a tradeoff - separate static and dynamic content into 2 separate archives which will reduce a little the load caused by an update.

Comment 6

[Sudheesh Singanamalla (:ShellHacker)]

Just waiting for some mentor to see what we could do so that I can take and work on this bug. This is a great idea KOLANICH *Smile*

Comment 7

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Sudheesh Singanamalla (:ShellHacker) from comment #6)
> Just waiting for some mentor to see what we could do so that I can take and
> work on this bug. This is a great idea KOLANICH *Smile*

This would be very nice to have; that said, I'm not sure of the best approach. There are a few things here:

1. It would be nice to be able to choose a specific part of MDN to get.
2. It'd be nice to get it as HTML, PDF, and/or ePub (in fact, ePub is the most interesting to me - I'd kill to have MDN sections as books in my iPad).
3. Ideally, there would be some options for how to style the output. Should it look just like it does on the Web? Use the included print style sheet? Allow the user to choose another stylesheet?

Comment 8

[Sudheesh Singanamalla (:ShellHacker)]

Eric, So do we do this as a separate app/hack ? or Do we write some enhancements in kuma to allow package downloads ?

Comment 9

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Sudheesh Singanamalla (:ShellHacker) from comment #8)
> Eric, So do we do this as a separate app/hack ? or Do we write some
> enhancements in kuma to allow package downloads ?

The intent is to add this to Kuma. We want to have an option in the "gear" menu (in the new design) for downloading a book, which would let you choose to download the page and its subpages in various formats.

Comment 10

[David Walsh :davidwalsh]

Someone else is working on this, I believe.

Comment 12

[Jarek Śmiejczak [:jotes]]

:sheppy
For me killer feature would be: send to kindle ;-) Is there any work done for this bug?

Comment 13

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This is constantly "almost done." I have no idea where we stand. Luke?

Comment 14

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Please see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About#Download_content too.

Exporting to Kindle would be amazing, but it's a huge feature and there are some 3rd-party alternatives that provide a bit of a work-around.

Comment 16

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.