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The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

blog.mozilla.org

81–90 of 113 posts

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

#82

A 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…

I 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

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

#83
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reasonable web browser lets you assign keywords to searches. No need to go through a third-party.

Which mobile browsers allow this? Does it synchronise them? I've used these a lot in the past, but switched to DDG's bangs largely because it was such a pain to change browsers/devices, and none of them ever worked for me on mobile. DDG's bangs are still a little unwieldy (! isn't a very convenient character to type, especially on mobile), so an alternative would be nice. For now though, the consistency everywhere fa…

In Firefox custom keywords are just bookmarks, and those sync. So this works on mobile. All you have to do is create bookmark with "%s" in the URL where you need substitution and give it a keyword, and typing ` ` in the URL bar will use the bookmark .

Unfortunately the UI isn't too great -- on desktop, the suggestions between the awesomebar show you that a keyword search will happen (just like when you type something matching an open tab it tells you that it will switch to tab unless you hit the down arrow to choose something else). On mobile there is no such indication, but hitting enter after typing the keyword followed by the query still works fine and does the keyword search thing.

I might try to fix that.

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

#84
post #31
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…

This 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.

exactly, 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.

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

#85
post #3

I'd guess they could have kept the acronym to mean Mozilla Documentation Nexus.

I 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.

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

#86

A 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…

I 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

I 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 ;) )

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

#87
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.

i like php.net's "user contributed notes" system:

https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.p...

https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php#u...

https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php#usernot...

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

#88
post #6
post #5

I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools

It already appears usually in higher positions than w3schools in Google, at least for me.

I 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.

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

#89
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any reasonable web browser lets you assign keywords to searches. No need to go through a third-party.

Using DDG is an awesome, ethical thing to do. The fact that it's actually got perks over Google is just the cherry on top.

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

#90
post #31
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…

This 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.

This 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.
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