The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

One 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

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.

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#9

Post by randallsquared » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

westoque wrote: post #5

I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools

Me, 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. ;)

Re: The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

#10

Post by vog » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 1:17 PM UTC

westoque wrote: post #5

I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools

Same 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

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 ... 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

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

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.