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The future of MDN: a focus on web docs
- Already__Taken 9y agoI don't know why this was done years ago instead of that web platform push.
- opendomain 9y agoThe Web Platform was a great idea and had Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera, and the W3C as stewards. Unfortunately, it may have been politics between some of the companies that prevented a real success. The good news is that we will revive the web platform on WebPlatform.Com as part of OpenDomain - anyone that wants to participate is welcome!
- klez 9y agoI'd guess they could have kept the acronym to mean Mozilla Documentation Nexus.
- smitherfield 9y agoI mean, they could've kept it "Mozilla Developer Network" — it's not like that doesn't sound like an online documentation resource (c.f. Microsoft Developer Network). I guess there's some ambiguity with e.g. a meetup group, but it should be obvious from context. It's possible the name change is for SEO reasons. Although they shouldn't need to; Google really ought to swallow their competitive pride and make MDN one of their previewed snippet sources, or else create their own webdev documentation source of equal or better quality.
- toxican 9y agoAny extra love and attention given to what I'd consider to be one of the greatest resources out there for web developers is great news to me.
- westoque 9y agoI just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools
- ungzd 9y agoIt already appears usually in higher positions than w3schools in Google, at least for me.
- talmand 9y agoI remember there was an effort to get related tech sites and blogs to reference MDN over W3Schools to attempt to get it higher in the search results.
- roselan 9y agoI installed "Personal Blocklist" extension exclusively for w3schools...
- randallsquared 9y agoMe, too. However, if your opinion on W3Schools is from ten years ago when they were sketchy and misleading, it may interest you to know that it's much better now. I don't reflexively hit the back button when I land there from a search, now -- sometimes the info I'm looking for is actually there. ;)
- vog 9y agoSame for RFCs. Let's search for "rfc 1855". The first item is indeed the original plain text source, unfortunately without links or anything: - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt But the second hit is a third-party source, that doesn't provide much over the plain text version. It doesn't even contain the RFC contents directly. I can't imagine anyone seriously linked to that page, let alone that so many are doing it to push it to the second place: - https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855 ... wtf?! Moreover, the RFC authors group itself, the IETF, already provides a beautiful HTML representation, with links and everything: - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 But you won't find that in the first 10 hits. Not even in the first 50 hits, for that matter. You will find it, however, if you click at the third item, which is the corresponding Wikipedia entry: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology The very first item in the "External links" section points to tools.ietf.org. Given the prominent low-quality links to w3schools, rfc-editor and so on, I'm asking myself if Google is actively harming Mozilla and IETF. Maybe not harming, but being ignorant. These issues are known for years. If they want to be the best possible search engine, why don't they do anything about these widely known issues? I understand that they'd rather fix their algorithms than adding special rules for IETF, but then, they should have analyzed their algorithms how they can be tricked by low-quality sites. And fix that. Meanwhile, years have passed and nothing changed. Maybe we should introduce a new search engine: "Second-Order Wikipedia" It would work like this: 1. Look up the search terms in Wikipedia articles 2. For each hit, show the Links of all articles' "External Links" sections.
- sgentle 9y agoOne thing I think could really make a difference would be wrangling the reference data into some kind of semi-structured format with an API/machine readable format like the Node docs: https://nodejs.org/api/events.json https://nodejs.org/api/events.json There are a lot of documentation, code completion etc type things out there that currently rely on manual updating (eg Tern.js) or scraping (eg devdocs.io) to maintain this kind of data. It'd be good if there was a canonical source.
- wbamberg 9y agoWe're working on this... https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data, https://github.com/mdn/data https://github.com/mdn/data ...but it's going to be a slow process.
- mxuribe 9y agoYeah for this statement, "...often Web developers are looking for quick examples...", I don't even care if the examples are higher up on the page or not...I just would like more and more examples. Sometimes the examples are too few or don't fully exemplify options of particular functions, etc. Nevertheless, I'm absolutely grateful to all the folks who put in so much work into MDN. If you are one of those people, know that I thank YOU!
- cx1000 9y agoThis is one of the only reasons I sometimes end up back at w3schools after reading the mdn docs: when I'm looking for a quick, working, live example. A short example is worth a thousand words.
- ausjke 9y agoexactly, MDN is great, but it's too "academic" for me, it's good for reference, however I admit the time I spent on w3schools is 100x more than it's on MDNs.
- forgotpwtomain 9y agoThis is the kind of attitude that leads to low quality, scrappy code, akin to copy and pasting Stackoverflow; I don't believe that a developer should need a great memory but they should have a good understanding which examples do not provide. I really like that the MDN docs are well specified and hope it stays that way.
- Klathmon 9y agoThat's an unnecessarily broad statement. Nobody is arguing that we should be taking snippets and examples verbatim and use them 100% of the time without understanding them, just that there is value in having those snippets and examples available. I know damn well how arrays work in javascript, from how they are implemented and what structures they use in memory at smaller sizes all the way up to the difference between a missing element in a sparse array to a dense array with an undefined value in it. But sometimes I just want the snippet from MDN that "densifies" a sparse array. I know how it works, I can re-write it myself if needed, but I know that the one on MDN works and I won't hit any unexpected edge case because I forgot about some arcane bullshit thing. Not to mention that when I'm first learning a new language or syntax I personally do MUCH better seeing examples of the code and being able to step through them to get the basics down (where I can then dive deeper into the system to understand the edge cases, hopefully with examples themselves to make sure I get the point).
- niutech 9y agoThere is [edit: was] also a community-driven alternative to MDN: https://webplatform.github.io/docs/ https://webplatform.github.io/docs/
- peternicky 9y agoDiscontinued in 2015. Why would you recommend anyone use that site?
- nailer 9y agoMaybe because they didn't know? Sheesh.
- klez 9y agoMDN is community-driven. Source: I was part of that community for more than a year (first as a translator, than as a topic-driver).
- niutech 9y agoSorry, I meant "community-driven as well as MDN". English is not my mother tongue.
- amelius 9y agoCan we please have a comments section on every page of documentation?
- Etheryte 9y agoWhile the idea seems great in theory, I doubt Mozilla has the manpower to moderate it. The volume of comments would be astonishing, think Stack Overflow's Javascript tag – there are countless questions that have been answered time and again. Sorting and moderating them takes an insane amount of man-hours.
- klez 9y agoJust for reference, two years ago, during the Mozilla Work Week, one of the main problem that surfaced was that there were just a couple of people reviewing all new pages that were created and hunting for spam/illegal content
- goldfire 9y agoMSDN has this, and I have never seen a comment there that actually provided value to a reader of the page. It makes even less sense on MDN, because MDN is a wiki; if you think something is missing, you can get it added.
- uwu 9y agoi like php.net's "user contributed notes" system: https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php#usernotes https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.p... https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php#usernotes https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php#u... https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php#usernotes https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php#usernot...
- mkopinsky 9y agoExcept that a lot of the time those user contributed notes are bad code that no one should ever be copy-pasting. I wish php.net had some sort of curation for those.
- alistproducer2 9y agoI always tell my co-workers that MDN is the de-facto documentation for JavaScript. Whenever asking a JS question, they almost always ask me to look at some crap W3Schools article. The first thing I do is always check MDN first.
- fiatjaf 9y agoPlease stop forcing those stupid horrible-quality Portuguese translations upon me!
- klez 9y agoTo the best of my knowledge, if you go to https://developer.mozilla.org https://developer.mozilla.org you're just served articles in English (that may be because I have English set as my language in my browser, I don't remember what happens if I set it to my actual native language). But I noticed that Google search results actually are pointing me to my native language.
- fiatjaf 9y agoEnglish is my language in my browser, but they seem to be using IP addresses, because sometimes I get Portuguese articles. They should keep an endless cookie or whatever to never serve me anything besides English.
- louhike 9y agoThey automatically set it according to your location, I have the same problem in France.
- Svenskunganka 9y agoI'm Swedish, and get "redirected" to https://developer.mozilla.org/sv-SE/ https://developer.mozilla.org/sv-SE/ if I follow that link, even though I have English set as the language in my browser.
- Etheryte 9y agoOne thing that would be brilliant and would also help with numerous other issues would be if the site was open source and available on Github. This change would allow numerous improvements such as up-to-date, relevant examples, issues and pull requests for discussions and improvement etc.
- klez 9y agoMDN is a wiki, so you can in fact fix problems you find. Discussion is done via mailing list.
- nucleardog 9y agoIs it actually editable again? Last time I tried to edit an obvious error in the page the edit button led to a page telling you to create a ticket in bugzilla.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- warp 9y agoLooks like the code is on github at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma https://github.com/mozilla/kuma
- md224 9y agoI don't remember who built it, but MDN.io is a neat little tool that allows you to quickly jump to the MDN docs for a given topic. For example: http://mdn.io/flexbox http://mdn.io/flexbox Admittedly, I don't use it, but cool that it exists!
- alunchbox 9y agoA small feature in chrome you might like, there is a quick write up about it at the link listed below. Basically configure the URL search bar for MDN to be a searchable website. Change the keyword from the full Mozilla link into something simple like mdn. Then simply when searching in the url instead of going to google.ca just type 'mdn' and space then it will use the configuration of the search query to look inside the website so something like looking to see how Array.protoype.map() works just type mdn space before that and you'll go straight to the search results. This isn't limited to just MDN you can use it for Youtube, and other sites that support the query search string. If you are having trouble finding the settings in Chrome to get to then simply hit the 3 dots on the top right > settings > then at the top bar search for 'search' > Under the Search heading there will be a button labeled 'Manage Search Engines' click it > and read the article to see how to set it up. If you have visited MDN before it will show up in the lower section. All you need to do is change the middle text box to mdn and save. otherwise the last box will need to be https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s&w=3&qs=plugin https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s&w=3&qs=plugi... the first box is just a label used to display the search name you can leave it at default. happy searchin! https://www.wired.com/2013/09/h2-chrome-omnibox/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/h2-chrome-omnibox/
- mbel 9y agoFirefox has the same feature. To use it right click on any search box on any website you visit to assign it a keyword. This works great with vimperator, which has tab-completion for search keywords.
- flanbiscuit 9y agoI have found doing this unnecessary (for me) because just searching for "mdn whatever" in google gets me the MDN results I wanted as the top result with the rest of the page being populated by other related MDN results. Not saying that people shouldn't do it. Just offering a possible simpler alternative to be tested as well
- alunchbox 9y agoI had actually wanted to reply my original post to people discussing mdn not being the first result on a google search but I find my general work flow falls around ctrl+t (new tab) - I have a specialized extension for something on that page so it doesn't redirect me to google.ca. For a search I just type 'm' as I have it setup to be my main keyword and 'y' for youtube along with 'h' for hacker news search. And if I want to do a search from the same tab I do alt+l to get to url and I'm not losing any thought process or needing to filter through some other ad garbage coming from google when I'm in the flow, just get me to the meat and potatoes (of course YouTube and hackernews are not things I search for regularly during productive work flows ;) )
- kellengreen 9y agoKeep up the great work MDN! You're truly a life saver.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- WA 9y agoOnly one thing I care about: for Gods sake, remember my language preference in a cookie. No, I don't want to read incomplete docs in German. My English reading capabilities are just fine. And I certainly don't want to change the language every day when I revisit. Thanks
- scotu 9y agoas a workaround, if it's ok for you to have most of the web in english, you can change the preferred language in the browser settings: you put english first and then lower priority german. I'm not sure it will work in mdn, I tried it quickly and seemed to work
- cosinetau 9y agoI love the resiliency of Mozilla. It seems like most news about it and Firefox are are doom and gloom, especially when we're comparing Firefox to Chrome. So what does Mozilla do? Make their great documentation even better, and enrich the development community. These choices by the Mozilla foundation might be unrelated. However, if things go south, I hope the community remembers who is consistently advocating for it.
- nashashmi 9y agoBy the way, whatever happened to real web doc formats being established, like something that could one day make obsolete Ms word addin and PDF.