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> One of the things I don't like about webdev (among many) is that I even have to Google in the first place. Manpages are so much more immediate and accessible.
by markbnj 7y ago
> One of the things I don't like about webdev (among many) is that I even have to Google in the first place. Manpages are so much more immediate and accessible.
I don't really get this response. First there's the notion that "webdev" is the discipline where information is so fractured that you need to go googling around to figure out how to do everything. All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page that just gives you the answers. This is obviously not true, right?
The second thing is the idea that a man page for any one component, or even a set of components, could possibly contain enough information to allow you to build a complex system without consulting the experience of peers, colleagues and past practitioners, which is at least what we intend to do when we search google.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y agoAlso the "manpage" does exist - it's the spec. But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it.
- RussianCow 7y agoMDN does a pretty good job of distilling the web spec into readable documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
- mgkimsal 7y agoit's so 'readable' that a friend of mine is... reading it. Out loud. In to Soundcloud. (well, JS stuff anyway). https://soundcloud.com/user-956222694 https://soundcloud.com/user-956222694
- err4nt 7y agoI'm in the HTML specs and CSS specs every day :D - https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ - https://drafts.csswg.org/ https://drafts.csswg.org/
- Retric 7y agoReading web specs at least once will save you a lot of time. You don’t need to memorize the things, but it helps learning about capabilities that are easy to miss and keywords that’s make searching far more efficient.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI used to read the specs, but I think I gave that up about 15 years ago as no longer practical.
- megaremote 7y ago> But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it. I love how this is a unit of measure now. "I have never met anyone with an iphone, so...".
- username90 7y ago> All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page that just gives you the answers. This is obviously not true, right? It is true to some extent. The less dependencies you have the less you need Google. Have thousands of dependencies in node? You will likely google their different error messages a lot. Write low level C libraries where not having dependencies is a key feature? Then Google wont help you much at all, the few times I try I almost never find anything useful for my work. So the thing about web dev is that you automatically have all browsers as dependencies, not to mention all the libraries, frameworks and api's people are using in modern webdev workflows. Most other fields tend to have much simpler dependencies than that.