919217 - Tag Cloud at Home Page of MDN

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Dron Rathore]

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Easy Locating the categorized content and the one which is hot, say we just launch a product or a feature "X" on any Mozilla product and developers find it crazy and they jump straightaway on the MDN to learn more about it but still we can't put everything that goes out in open, right on the front page, so lets make it easier for people to locate the stuff quickly.

Who would use this?
===================
Developers, Enthusiastic Tech Geeks, NewBies(They would love to know the new features just landed and start hacking/customizing/using it).

What would users see?
=====================
A Tag cloud, well we can do that in HTML and CSS only, not 3D ones. Hot Tag names as Texts with varying font sizes into a 200*300 box or so.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
The List of docs for that tag, if its a product one then we will take to the category landing page(Well a different category is there for each product).

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
We can use XHR call to load it :) Or add a little CSS3 animation to it.

Comment 1

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I personally have always found tag clouds completely useless.

Comment 2

[Dron Rathore]

But consider it in a huge code base and documentation library as MDN where a subsection itself is too big to search for things. And tag cloud can be aimed to remove this fallback and also help people locate the related articles too, say WEBrtc is under JS, and then we have another article demonstrating video calls on FxOs using webrtc, they both are similar but for me to find them at a single place? May be difficult if not placed correctly, so we can solve the problem of overhead on the article contributors of finding things, placing them on right section, its hectic :)

So a tag in the cloud #WEBrtc can help people get all the related articles as well as the Main Section ones regardless of under which category they are.

Thanks! :)

Comment 3

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

Is this intended to be a redesign-launch blocker? Seems like it needs more thought / discussion / design work / etc.

Comment 4

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

(In reply to Les Orchard [:lorchard] from comment #3)
> Is this intended to be a redesign-launch blocker? Seems like it needs more
> thought / discussion / design work / etc.

Looks like Ali moved this from the collection of proposed launch blockers to the collection of potential post-launch improvements. She can say more about how the decision was made.

Comment 5

[David Walsh :davidwalsh]

I'm against this, for the record.  Tag clouds are an artifact of "web 2.0" and don't serve a purpose, especially on our homepage.  The homepage is about much more than the wiki.  I would like this truly reviewed, not just as a priority but in that we shouldn't do this.

Comment 6

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I do agree on David : I don't see the purpose of a tag cloud on the MDN.

Comment 7

[ali spivak]

I agree - I think the concept of "what's popular on MDN" is great, but a tag cloud is probably not the best way to implement it.