Documenting the Web together

Re:Documenting the Web together by vinhboy on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:31PM (#15501078)

I've never understood the hate for w3schools. I've always found them to be extremely useful. I like that usage examples is the focus of their site. I find that more useful than wordy documentations that more advanced references provide.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by TAForObvReasons on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:33PM (#15501102)

http://www.w3fools.com/ top of the page summarizes the situation:

> When W3Fools was launched in 2011, the state of documentation for developers was poor. This site documented many content errors and issues with the W3Schools website. The Mozilla Developer Network was around but it did not have much support at the time.

> Today, W3Schools has largely resolved these issues and addressed the majority of the undersigned developers' concerns. For many beginners, W3Schools has structured tutorials and playgrounds that offer a decent learning experience. Do keep in mind: a more complete education will certainly include MDN and other reputable resources.

MDN would greatly benefit from more soft documentation and a playground setup similar to W3Schools

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Re:Documenting the Web together by 52-6F-62 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:41PM (#15501174)

I'm still waiting for the true spiritual revival of HTML Goodies https://web.archive.org/web/19980130110903/http://htmlgoodie...

Or not. MDN usually suits me fine.

Actually, I find TutorialsPoint https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ generally pretty good, if not lacking in some depth. They give a decent soft intro, though.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by eradicatethots on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:05PM (#15501391)

I think if you tried to add that to mdn you’d make it worse at what it’s good for

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Re:Documenting the Web together by smidgen2 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:12PM (#15501471)

When I was a noob, w3schools was far more useful. I learned HTML and CSS on w3schools. Now I'm more of an expert, I need the detailed documentation that MDN has. Each site has its niche. Still sometimes reference w3schools because it's easier to read, though.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by tambourine_man on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:01PM (#15501350)

Yeah, MDN is akin to Unix man pages, W3Schools is more to the point.

They've corrected most of the bad sample code.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by shawnz on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:16PM (#15501510)

They aggressively create separate pages for every element and attribute, each full of ads, but hardly any containing substantive descriptions of the things they document. At worst they just restate the name of the attribute in different words. And the examples, while sometimes nice, often just show the effect of turning a property on or off and don't really demonstrate the different things you can do with it. If they focused more on substance and less on SEO, they could be a much better resource.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by jwdunne on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:40PM (#15501753)

I'm surprised. This is the type of thing that should fall within the Panda update cross hairs. Thin content, heavy ads - Google should by design be favouring pages that aren't shooting for cheap long tail hits.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by brokentone on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:35PM (#15501127)

At this point (trying to be a good citizen, not using an ad blocker) the ads on the site lock up my computer, and a simple lookup turns into a substantial time investment. Vs MDN doesn't have this issue.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by irrational on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:49PM (#15501835)

How can you use the web without an ad blocker? Anytime I get on a browser without an ad blocker I'm reminded of how slow and horrible the web used to be (and apparently still is).

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Re:Documenting the Web together by weberc2 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:46PM (#15501800)

They were great in 2006 when I was learning, but they're not nearly as useful as MDN (even foregoing the accusations that w3schools is errant and spammy). It's simply annoying to have to manually filter the w3schools (and others) search results when MDN is sooo much better.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by frik on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:21PM (#15501559)

I use w3schools and MDN, both. w3schools improved a lot over the years, and it's easy to find something fast. MDN is more in depth. CanIuse.com is another very useful resource. Google should keep all three resources in the top results.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by gicadin on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:17PM (#15501518)

Wc3 is good as a reference to html or css syntax but I feel it's spread it's tentacles to far and wide. It's the first result when I search for a php method, and I don't feel it's nearly as good as the php manual

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Re:Documenting the Web together by madeofpalk on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:22PM (#15500997)

I’ll never/rarely click a w3schools link, but I do find MDN to be quite difficult to read with it’s pages being quite technical and terse. W3schools is quite pragmatic with providing a reference for CSS properties.

I hope these extra resources will let MDN improve on this.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by monocasa on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:33PM (#15501684)

Yeah. I treat w3schools vs MDN like Simple English Wiki vs regular Wikipedia. There's some subjects on Wikipedia (like math particularly) where to understand the wiki page, you need such a good background that you don't need the wiki page anyway. It's good to have a simpler, not complete place to get your feet wet first.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by HatchedLake721 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:33PM (#15501107)

Exactly. Sometimes I just close MDN and then click on w3schools link for this reason.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by booleandilemma on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:32PM (#15501092)

I agree. I feel like going to MDN to quickly look up syntax is like trying to kill a fly with a handgun.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by megalodon on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:42PM (#15501193)

I’m quite the opposite, I feel like MDN is the only sane resource in an ocean of opinionated crap. Not saying it covers everything but for syntax it’s practically the only place I visit.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by weberc2 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:50PM (#15501838)

Same here. For syntax and quick examples, I find w3schools much harder to parse than MDN. Maybe there's more noise in w3schools, or maybe the layout/design of MDN are better for these purposes.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by llccbb on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:14PM (#15501491)

But going to w3schools is like trying to kill a fly with a flyswatter with a dashed red border of weight 2px. Their examples are so basic, pre-canned, and repetitious between pages that you rarely see useful options and intricacies that each tag/property may posses.

For super quick syntax checks ("Is it fill-opacity or opacity?") MDN might be a little overboard, but as any sort of reference beyond 3 line snippets it is the link that I always look for. I usually append MDN to the end of my searches for HTML/SVG help.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by wil421 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:31PM (#15501075)

Agreed. Even simple concepts can have overly technical examples on MDN. Sometimes it causes me to overthink a simple script.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by wnevets on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:42PM (#15501196)

> or at least allow me to remove certain websites from my searches.

Im currently using a chrome extension from google[0] to do exactly this.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

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Re:Documenting the Web together by amelius on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:11PM (#15501465)

Why is this supported through a Chrome extension?

Google is tracking everything about me. So I expect that certainly they can track which sites I don't like, especially when I mark them as such.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by wnevets on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:42PM (#15501765)

They use to for a short time, I don't recall if they ever said why they removed the feature from google search itself. This extension came after they removed it.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by the8472 on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:18PM (#15500957)

https://www.google.com/search?q=querySelectorAll+-site:w3sch...

this syntax has been supported for many years

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Re:Documenting the Web together by haberman on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:23PM (#15501009)

I also like the "Personal Blocklist" extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

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Re:Documenting the Web together by mrighele on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:24PM (#15501011)

I think the parent meant to exclude some domains from every search. I would love that too. If I have to add "-site:somedomain.com" (and maybe even many of them!) it takes less effort ignore them in the result

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Re:Documenting the Web together by hollander on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:32PM (#15501095)

Bookmark that. I use the following:

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&newwindow=1&num=30

I remove the ei identifier from the bookmark. I guess this is a unique ID that makes it possible for google to keep following me if I happen to bookmark it. Eg:

ei=Vo_n34buB9Cabdedfk6gO

And I happen to like the W3school examples, especially CSS. They've helped me many times. I don't see the problem with them, but please ignore them if you don't like it.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by nachtigall on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:27PM (#15501628)

I find duckduckgo much better for these kind of searches. It also shows a brief instant result which is usually an excerpt from MDN.

Actually, I find duckduckgo better for all kinds of technical searches these days.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by badestrand on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:35PM (#15501702)

Their Stack Overflow integration is to me one of the best things that ever happened to search engines.

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Re:Documenting the Web together by accountforty on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @02:37PM (#15501727)

IMO W3schools has some of the best development tutorials for beginners

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Re:Documenting the Web together by jrowley on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @01:17PM (#15500949)

Some googlers made this w3fools, so employees certainly aren't fond of w3schools.

http://www.w3fools.com/

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