Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 113 posts

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

#51

Post by RodericDay »

savanaly wrote: post #34
westoque wrote: post #5

I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools

I've just had to get into the habit of appending mdn to all my web development queries to make it show up at the top. Can't count the number of time's I've done the search "[some new array method] mdn". Invaluable website.

If DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can just do

    !mdn
and get the MDN search results page.

You can also do the same for stuff like

    !gweek
And get google results limited to the last week (or StartPage ones if you swap the g for and s).

It's amazing.

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

#52

Post by goldfire »

amelius wrote: post #24

Can we please have a comments section on every page of documentation?

MSDN 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.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

Etheryte wrote: post #40

One 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.

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by lenzm »

vog wrote: post #10
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…

If your new search engine became popular, the incentive to spam Wikipedia would be enormous again. 10 years ago, Wikipedia decided to nofollow all links because of the spam for Google relevance:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-wikipedia-links-are-...

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

#55

Post by niutech »

klez wrote: post #41
niutech wrote: post #20

There is [edit: was] also a community-driven alternative to MDN: https://webplatform.github.io/docs/

MDN is community-driven. Source: I was part of that community for more than a year (first as a translator, than as a topic-driver).

Sorry, I meant "community-driven as well as MDN". English is not my mother tongue.

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

#57

Post by menacingly »

mxuribe wrote: post #12

Yeah 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…

An example is much more effective in a lot of cases. I really wish there were more of them in man pages.

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

#58

Post by Aldo_MX »

aviraldg wrote: post #35
Kiro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically maybe but I don't think that's true nowadays.

Even then, why would you support a closed, commercial, outdated website instead of MDN which is essentially a wiki?

The same reason why beginners get a sentiment of attachment with websites like Stack Overflow.

They're looking for "how to do ", not for the docs.

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

#59

Post by frandroid »

absove wrote: post #38
savanaly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just had to get into the habit of appending mdn to all my web development queries to make it show up at the top. Can't count the number of time's I've done the search "[some new array method] mdn". Invaluable website.

In firefox you can also add it as an alternative search engine.

You can do that in pretty much every browser, and also add a search keyword (e.g. mdn), so you can do "mdn array" to search the MDN site for "array".

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

#60

Post by lucideer »

RodericDay wrote: post #51
savanaly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just had to get into the habit of appending mdn to all my web development queries to make it show up at the top. Can't count the number of time's I've done the search "[some new array method] mdn". Invaluable website.

If DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can just do !mdn and get the MDN search results page. You can also do the same for stuff like !gweek And get google results limited to the last week (or StartPage ones if you swap the g for and s). It's amazing.

I could be imagining it, but in addition to the "instant answer" feature which uses MDN, DuckDuckGo's indexer also seems to give some priority to MDN over W3S in comparison to Google, in my experience. If W3S is first, MDN is usually second whereas it may be 5th/whatever in Google.
Post reply on HN