Mozilla is looking for help for its browser-agnostic Web documentation | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla is looking for help for its browser-agnostic Web documentation

hacks.mozilla.org

83 pointslillycat23 comments

If you think w3schools is crap and the Open Web can do better, please join MDN and help build the best free and open Web documentation repository in the world. Already using MDN? Consider giving back by linking your standards articles to MDN or contributing docs or doc improvements. It's a big project, but so is the Open Web.

I'm hoping that all that link love will push MDN up over w3schools in google search results. I always have to append MDN to my query terms to get the documentation I'm after. I'm never logged in to google, so I can't block all results from w3schools. It's a pity there aren't any per-browser (rather than per user) settings for to weigh search results differently. edit: Fiddling a bit, it seems like blocking w3schools is a moving target.. I have to block www.w3sch.. wwww.w3scho.. wap.w3scho... etc.

An other option would be to use DDG as your browser's (default) search engine and using bang-searches (`!mdn Array` in DDG will automatically redirect to MDN's search), or adding some sort of prefix for mdn (e.g. `j foo` to look for "foo" in JavaScript ~ MDN)

Be pretty easy to write a simple Chrome or firefox extension to do that.

I think MDN is a noble project but a horrible website.

I find the site an absolute pain to use and every major change Mozilla has made over the past few years has made it worse.

To me, the site is badly structured, badly laid out and as slow as hell. I constantly feel like I'm fighting against it.

Much of the blame lies with the wiki software, which is confusing, cluttered and likely prevents any community from springing up around the site.

If I were Mozilla, I would rename it something like 'Web Doc Wiki' and move it over to stock MediaWiki installation. It might not be flashy but people are familiar with MediaWiki and people more likely to contribute to a site that looks like a wiki.

I agree. http://dochub.io is a pretty solid implementation of MDN.

This website has been a great tool for someone like me who only does occasional work on the web. I would love if all documentation looked this good.

dochub.io pulls data from MDN. They deserve hugs. <3

Plus, the domain name is hard to remember and long to type.

What would you rather we used, other than developer.mozilla.org?

A catchy top level domain name probably.

Any ideas, in particular?

FWIW: I work on MDN.

In short: We're in the process of basically rewriting the wiki software from scratch, right now [1]. There are a lot of growing pains. MediaWiki won't cut it.

Pull requests welcome!

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

It's a shame their site is so slow. It often takes 10+ seconds to open a single MDN page, so sometimes I just click the w3schools link if I don't feel like waiting.

If only they used plain HTTP instead of HTTPS...

The slowness is probably a big part of their ranking problem.

Indeed. Here's some statistically ignorant experiment I just did. Loading the Function [1] document (not the whole page, just the document) takes around 1.6 s here:

  Connecting:  0.837 s
         SSL:  0.258 s
     Sending:  0     s
     Waiting:  0.767 s
   Receiving:  0.001 s

   Xfer Size: 14.26  KB (gzip)
      onload:  3.37  s  (primed cache)
              12.78  s  (empty cache)

The SSL overhead is really a big deal, but waiting 0.8 s for what is basically static content just makes no sense. Meanwhile, in w3schools world, it takes around 0.2 s to get the “same” content [2]:

   Blocking:  0     s
    Sending:  0     s
    Waiting:  0.204 s
  Receiving:  0.037 s

  Xfer Size: 23.94  KB (plain)
     onload:  1.09  s  (primed cache)
              1.82  s  (empty cache)

I don't know if I can compare the networking numbers here, but I definitely can compare the onload result — MDC is annoyingly slow. Their content is excellent, they just need to improve the website performance to become the top Google result.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...

[2] http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_functions.asp

Believe it or not, HTTP vs HTTPS is not the problem. As I mentioned in another thread:

We're rewriting the wiki basically from scratch [1]. There are problems and growing pains. Pull requests welcome!

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

I'll volunteer to write something about vendor prefixes.

In my opinion, they should've applied to GSoC for this too.

Speaking in my capacity as someone involved with Django (which accepts Summer of Code proposals each year)... that doesn't fly. GSoC has an explicit ban on documentation projects.

The fact that you can't document the web standards in a few pages demonstrates how badly designed it is. Instead of shaping humans to fit the system, the system should be simple enough that anyone can understand it. The limit is then just how creative and clever they can be with that understanding.

Remember when anyone could do some calculations in Basic and assembler? Now you have to absorb loads of "expert" knowledge to do anything interesting.

Computing is hard; let's go shopping.

The "computing is hard" excuse is a pathetic cop-out by people who can't see past their own self interest.

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