[Experiment] Provide complete minimal reference for SVGAElement interface

[chrisdavidmills]

Description

This PR is part of an experiment conducted by Mozilla in which we are looking at trying to find efficient ways to fill in all the content gaps of features that have BCD but no content pages.

For this one, I've filled in minimal pages for all the members of the SVGAElement interface. This includes:

• Frontmatter
• Description
• Value, Specifications, and Browser compatibility sections
• Minimal See also links where appropriate

It does not include examples or detailed usage information. The idea is that having this minimal documentation is better than nothing, and it might encourage contributors to fill in more details. Creating these 16 pages took me probably 45 minutes, and I did it manually as a test.

The questions we want to explore are:

1. Is this enough content to be useful?
2. Could we automate it to speed it up further?

Note that some pages do not have BCD, so this would need to be updated as well.

Motivation

Additional details

Related issues and pull requests

[github-actions]

Preview URLs (17 pages)

• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/download
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/hash
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/host
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/hostname
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/hreflang
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/origin
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/password
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/pathname
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/ping
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/port
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/protocol
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/referrerpolicy
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/search
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/text
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/type
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement/username
• /en-US/docs/Web/API/SVGAElement

(comment last updated: 2025-10-13 12:18:27)

[sideshowbarker]

It does not include examples or detailed usage information. The idea is that having this minimal documentation is better than nothing

I agree with that idea.

and it might encourage contributors to fill in more details

…and I agree it’s a good bet that would actually happen to some degree.

If a potential contributor has some details in mind that they’d like to contribute to MDN, but when they go to look at the sources and find that a page doesn’t actually yet exist yet for them to add some details to, that contributor is less likely to be motivated to write the entire page from scratch themselves just in order to add the particular details they’d like to add.

On other hand, if the appropriate page does already exist — even if it’s just a stub — that contributor is much more likely to take time to add their details there.

And also if a page does already exist for something and contributor comes across it while browsing, the existence of the page can prompt them to think about that particular property or method or whatever that’s documented on that page, and cause them to think, Oh, I have some idea about some specific details about this property or method that reading this page has made me think about.

The questions we want to explore are:

1. Is this enough content to be useful?

Yes, IMHO this is very much on the right track. Having a minimal page is better than having no page at all.

2. Could we automate it to speed it up further?

Seems like it sure could be automated in some way, yeah

[chrisdavidmills]

@sideshowbarker Thanks for the review and the feedback, Mike! I'm leaving this unmerged for now to give others a chance to provide feedback too.

[Rumyra]

Thanks so much @chrisdavidmills this is precisely the sort of thing I was thinking 👍

Agree strongly with @sideshowbarker here, while these pages can be improved, having something is much more accessible to improvement than having nothing.

Moving forward we'll need to ensure bcd is complete to be able to properly automate the process from start to finish, but generating pages based on templates should be quite straight forward.

I'm putting together a plan for next year on what we can optimise/automate to make things easier for writers, so we may not have anything initially when starting the 'fill the gaps' work, but I'll share when I have more of a plan :)