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Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

> One of the things I don't like about webdev (among many) is that I even have to Google in the first place. Manpages are so much more immediate and accessible.

I don't really get this response. First there's the notion that "webdev" is the discipline where information is so fractured that you need to go googling around to figure out how to do everything. All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page that just gives you the answers. This is obviously not true, right?

The second thing is the idea that a man page for any one component, or even a set of components, could possibly contain enough information to allow you to build a complex system without consulting the experience of peers, colleagues and past practitioners, which is at least what we intend to do when we search google.

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> All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page that just gives you the answers. This is obviously not true, right?

It is true to some extent. The less dependencies you have the less you need Google. Have thousands of dependencies in node? You will likely google their different error messages a lot. Write low level C libraries where not having dependencies is a key feature? Then Google wont help you much at all, the few times I try I almost never find anything useful for my work.

So the thing about web dev is that you automatically have all browsers as dependencies, not to mention all the libraries, frameworks and api's people are using in modern webdev workflows. Most other fields tend to have much simpler dependencies than that.

Also the "manpage" does exist - it's the spec. But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it.

MDN does a pretty good job of distilling the web spec into readable documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

it's so 'readable' that a friend of mine is... reading it. Out loud. In to Soundcloud. (well, JS stuff anyway).

https://soundcloud.com/user-956222694

I'm in the HTML specs and CSS specs every day :D

- https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

- https://drafts.csswg.org/

Reading web specs at least once will save you a lot of time. You don’t need to memorize the things, but it helps learning about capabilities that are easy to miss and keywords that’s make searching far more efficient.

I used to read the specs, but I think I gave that up about 15 years ago as no longer practical.

> But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it.

I love how this is a unit of measure now. "I have never met anyone with an iphone, so...".

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