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Documenting the Web together

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Re: Documenting the Web together

#181

Post by roblabla »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #178
roblabla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because video-games is still the one place where Mac and Linux are lagging behind, and they have DirectX to thank a lot for that.

In case of Linux, you forgot availability of drivers, cohesive user experience, stability and ergonomy rather than programmer designed interfaces.

I guess I should have said "Mac or Linux", but I'll answer your points because they tick me off.

First some context : I'm both a Windows, Mac and Linux user, and my favorite is probably Mac. But I've converted a fair share of my family to Linux (my grandma too) because it's more predictable than Windows, and cheaper than MacOS (I'm basically my family's IT hotline). Most of what I'll talk here is a mix of my own experience, and feedback from my family members.

Let's talk about drivers. Turns out, drivers are available for most of the hardware you'll need (which is basically GPU, WiFi, Bluetooth and Webcam). Sure, this weird piece of equipment might not have linux drivers, but in truth I can't even remember the last time I've hit that problem. I don't think equipment compatibility is the reason people use Windows in 2017 anyway, given we're all using Android/Linux on our smartphones and tablets, so I'll move on.

Let's talk about cohesive UX. Windows, since 8 and 10, has the least cohesive UX ever. Running Gnome or KDE on Linux today will get you a more cohesive UX than win10, and that's no compliment. Half the Windows apps still use the old winforms look, half use the new metro (or whatever it is called) look, and then there's all the webapps that have their own custom look and feel. Cortana is a clusterfuck of an UX, the File Manager has this weird "It's a filesystem but not really" mentality (the location bar doesn't show the full hierarchy, WHY ?), and there are so many papercuts here and there that I end up fighting my OS half the time.

Let's talk about stability. Windows forces reboots every few days because it has "mandatory updates". Windows basically built this feature where they force the computer to reboot and the user has absolutely no say in the matter. This is not the stability guarantee I'm looking for. Another anecdata : one of the few family members to still have a windows has a Microsoft Surface Pro. She has to reboot it every few days because it won't detect the Wifi card anymore. Microsoft can't even make their own OS stable on their own hardware.

Windows might have been good at all of this at one point, but that's not the case anymore. It's become terrible at all of it. So bad that Linux slowly creeped its way into my family, and that made my life much easier.

Re: Documenting the Web together

#182

Post by Doxin »

nl wrote: post #175
ghostly_s wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python's official docs do a good job with this approach too, I think. The Python Language Reference is relatively easy to read for a lay-man when that's necessary, and includes the formal logic of the spec in little call-out boxes -- but it's also accompanied by the Python Tutorial, which manages to cover nearly everything while making no attempt to get into every edge-case and obscure method, keeping it focused and…

Oh wow, I disagree with this quite strongly. I find they lack useful examples, and it's ridiculously hard to find even the list of methods.

What even does "the list of methods" mean? Do you mean the builtins? Those are at the docs for built in functions.[1] Or do you mean the list of all functions? Because that doesn't exist for the very good reason that it doesn't make sense to have a list like that for python. There's the module index[2] though which lists every available module, linking to their docs which list all the available functions in those modules.

Having a single list of all functions in python makes very little sense for the simple reason that you'd not be able to find what you're looking for in that list so you might as well just use the search in the first place.

Side note: if there's a specific function you'd like to get the documentation for you can get that easily from the interactive python prompt with the "help" function:

    >>> help(zip)
And I fail to see the "missing examples". While it's true that most modules don't contain examples for every single function they usually contain a few examples for the overarching concept.

So which part exactly of the python docs is bad? IMO they are, by far, the best docs any programming language has.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html [2] https://docs.python.org/3/py-modindex.html

Re: Documenting the Web together

#183

Post by NiveaGeForce »

roblabla wrote: post #100
shmerl wrote: post #76

> One of our guiding principles in developing Microsoft Edge is that end users should never have to worry about which sites work in which browsers. This philosophy—”the Web should just work for everyone“—led to our choice to target the “interoperable intersection” of web APIs in our browser engineering. That's a good move by MS. In this context it's great to see them supporting open codecs, and for istance OGG contai…

Because video-games is still the one place where Mac and Linux are lagging behind, and they have DirectX to thank a lot for that.

Nonsense, any of such APIs are abstracted away in most game engines, and cover only a tiny fraction of a game engine codebase.

Re: Documenting the Web together

#185

Post by NiveaGeForce »

roblabla wrote: post #181
skocznymroczny wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of Linux, you forgot availability of drivers, cohesive user experience, stability and ergonomy rather than programmer designed interfaces.

I guess I should have said "Mac or Linux", but I'll answer your points because they tick me off. First some context : I'm both a Windows, Mac and Linux user, and my favorite is probably Mac. But I've converted a fair share of my family to Linux (my grandma too) because it's more predictable than Windows, and cheaper than MacOS (I'm basically my family's IT hotline). Most of what I'll talk here is a mix of my own expe…

Windows is better and more efficient than it ever was, thanks to many improvements since Windows 8.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/74xc2z/windows_an...

Most default Windows apps are UWP with Fluent Design now, and more are migrating towards that since they have major advantages that you won't find on Mac and most Linux distros

https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/75lgti/announcing...

Also, your other points mostly contain misinformation.

Re: Documenting the Web together

#186

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

frik wrote: post #168
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #103

Déjà vu. Previously ( checks email …almost exactly 5 years ago?! Christ, it was a long time ago), the web powers that be announced they were going to collaborate on a new web docs wiki.[0] I don't think it went anywhere because, well, MDN already existed. I'm glad they finally just surrendered to MDN, even if it was many years late. [0] https://www.w3.org/2012/10/webplatform.html.en

"One of our guiding principles in developing Microsoft Edge is that end users should never have to worry about which sites work in which browsers. This philosophy—”the Web should just work for everyone“—led to our choice to target the “interoperable intersection” of web APIs in our browser engineering." Many sites already don't work correctly in Edge, IE11 nor Firefox - it's too late, these are minor browsers, used b…

Chrome descends from WebKit, but it isn't WebKit. As I unfortunately learned recently when a workaround for a WebKit bug broke modern Chrome.

Re: Documenting the Web together

#187

Post by ConfucianNardin »

jasonkester wrote: post #171

I really miss the old MSDN Library. The 5GB installable one you'd get as one of the 200 DVDs in that giant case they'd ship you with your MSDN subscription back in the day. It was awesome. You could hit F1 and it would instantly pop up good, detailed, documentation for whatever method or keyword was under your cursor. In any of their developer products, so it worked as well in SQL Server Management Studio as in VS.NE…

VS2017 opens the correct documentation most of the time, and in the default web browser.

For C++, cppreference provides archives of all their docs: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives.

Of course, that won't help you for Win32 or .NET.

There's also https://zealdocs.org/

Re: Documenting the Web together

#188

Post by roblabla »

NiveaGeForce wrote: post #185
roblabla wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I should have said "Mac or Linux", but I'll answer your points because they tick me off. First some context : I'm both a Windows, Mac and Linux user, and my favorite is probably Mac. But I've converted a fair share of my family to Linux (my grandma too) because it's more predictable than Windows, and cheaper than MacOS (I'm basically my family's IT hotline). Most of what I'll talk here is a mix of my own expe…

Windows is better and more efficient than it ever was, thanks to many improvements since Windows 8. https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/74xc2z/windows_an... Most default Windows apps are UWP with Fluent Design now, and more are migrating towards that since they have major advantages that you won't find on Mac and most Linux distros https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/75lgti/announcing... Also, your othe…

I never claimed windows hasn't been getting better in other departments. And I'll agree that a default Windows install is probably more battery efficient than a default Linux install. But that wasn't the point.

To respond to your point specifically, I said the UX in windows 8/10 is terrible. I hope it gets better, but right now, strictly speaking, win7 was the last time windows had a cohesive UX.

And please tell where the misinformation is. Mandatory updates were a thing[0] (seems they fixed that, good). The wifi card problem on surface pros is documented[1]. The explorer does break the hierarchy analogy consistently, you can see by yourself that the location bar doesn't show the full hierarchy when you access "Libraries" (whatever those are).

When you claim misinformation, please say what is. It might allow me, or you, or someone else in this thread, to learn something !

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-windows-10-forced-update...

[1]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-acknowledges-surfac...

Re: Documenting the Web together

#190

Post by nashashmi »

jasonkester wrote: post #171

I really miss the old MSDN Library. The 5GB installable one you'd get as one of the 200 DVDs in that giant case they'd ship you with your MSDN subscription back in the day. It was awesome. You could hit F1 and it would instantly pop up good, detailed, documentation for whatever method or keyword was under your cursor. In any of their developer products, so it worked as well in SQL Server Management Studio as in VS.NE…

Visual studio is not the only tool that went online. Many MS office products went this route. AutoCAD did too. However, AC has an option to download offline help. The office products have an option to stay offline. It does not work that well, in my experience.

I guess some guy at MS thought: People look online for solutions; We should do that too!

They broke things because the web browser was slow and the search results sucked.

There is potential for improvement. The platform is set for that. But only if someone could go and do the work we would not be talking about this anymore.

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