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The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

blog.mozilla.org

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

#101

Post by b0rsuk »

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…

Certainly there's room for more examples. Having to choose between often abstract MDN and the opposite - often zero theory Stack Overflow - is awful. I've learned to take SO with a dose of salt - you may pick up bad practices (especially for rare problems), outdated solutions etc.

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

#102

Post by cosinetau »

I 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.

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

#104

Post by bastawhiz »

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…

> I just would like more and more examples.

I'd like relevant examples. It's incredibly frustrating to look at an MDN snippet to see code that no sane human would ever write. Self-executing closures that return callbacks inside for-in loops, initialization code that still checks readyState, code that avoids more than one function for no obvious reason...MDN can be a real crap-shoot. Hell, I'd be happy if they would name their variables sensible things instead of trash like `numFoo`.

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

#105

Post by fiatjaf »

cosinetau wrote: post #103
fiatjaf wrote: post #33

Please stop forcing those stupid horrible-quality Portuguese translations upon me!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Contribute/Loca...

You don't get it. I don't want translations. I don't want to contribute because I don't think it is possible to translate programming code and documentation satisfactorily and I don't think it is worth trying.

If there are people who think it is, they can do it, but I just want to read everything in English when it comes to programming.

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

#106

Post by jholman »

Klathmon wrote: post #91
forgotpwtomain wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That'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 betwee…

> but I know that the one on MDN works and I won't hit any unexpected edge case

MDN is a wiki. People who want to contribute documentation or examples do so. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they're suffering from Dunning-Kruger. It is unreasonable to assume that the example will work and will not have unexpected edge cases.

It's the best resource I know on the web, which is I recommend it, and why I've contributed to it, but it's a wiki. Caveat emptor. (Caveat lector?)

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

#107

Post by EdSharkey »

was8309 wrote: post #72
louhike wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They automatically set it according to your location, I have the same problem in France.

if you don't want geo location for other reasons, you can turn it off : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1002846

This "geo.enabled" flag should be false by default on desktop Firefox! >

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

#109

Post by mkopinsky »

uwu wrote: post #87
goldfire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Except 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.

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

#110

Post by nucleardog »

klez wrote: post #43
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.

MDN is a wiki, so you can in fact fix problems you find. Discussion is done via mailing list.

Is 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.

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