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

Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 103 posts

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#2

Post by cies »

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish.

MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#3

Post by cies »

cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

Because of this rant I had a look at the company behind w3shools. This is their about page:

https://w3schools.sinsixx.com/about/about_refsnes.asp.htm

If you want to communicate "stuck in the 90s", take this as your example! The photo of the "Web Masters", the favicon, the W3C-badges, the gif-badge webhosting ad, fixed-width, the CMS400 ad, the bordered boxes around everything. I had a blast.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#5

Post by Liquid_Fire »

cies wrote: post #3
cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

Because of this rant I had a look at the company behind w3shools. This is their about page: https://w3schools.sinsixx.com/about/about_refsnes.asp.htm If you want to communicate "stuck in the 90s", take this as your example! The photo of the "Web Masters", the favicon, the W3C-badges, the gif-badge webhosting ad, fixed-width, the CMS400 ad, the bordered boxes around everything. I had a blast.

To be fair, that seems to be a copy of the page from more than 10 years ago (note the "Copyright 1999-2009" in the footer). The current website still seems to be run by the same company but looks much more modern.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#6

Post by luke2m »

cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

Every page is an .asp file.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#7

Post by onion2k »

cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years.

There's no practical incentive for Google to prioritize MDN over w3schools though. Google doesn't seem to rank sites on quality any more. I suspect they rank sites on "ad profitability" instead. Showing users websites that have adverts means users click on more adverts, which Google benefits from (by encouraging that user behavior even if they're not the ad publisher themselves).

w3schools has been online since 1998. MDN has been online since 2005. Why would Google change the search results in the coming years rather than at any time in the previous 17 years if they were aiming for quality?

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#8

Post by toastal »

The new MDN design looks snazzy but no longer works in NetSurf. I would hope a resource like this was highly accessible, even to browsers without CSS3 support (isn't this why we have @supports?). It's also furthering a trope of themes being a binary toggle; there are more options than just white and gray--how about OLED black to conserve the least about of power (looks better on my screens too).

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#10

Post by NavinF »

cies wrote: post #3
cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

Because of this rant I had a look at the company behind w3shools. This is their about page: https://w3schools.sinsixx.com/about/about_refsnes.asp.htm If you want to communicate "stuck in the 90s", take this as your example! The photo of the "Web Masters", the favicon, the W3C-badges, the gif-badge webhosting ad, fixed-width, the CMS400 ad, the bordered boxes around everything. I had a blast.

Personally I found that page and photo to be adorable and it improved my overall impression of w3shools from “an acceptable target of ridicule” to “aww, they’re trying their best even if they’re a bit clueless”.

If HN allowed embedded media, you can bet there would be a headpat animation in this comment.

Post reply on HN