Just to chip in with a very minor annoyance, I hate how google puts up w3schools results above MDN for anything related to JS/HTML.
Stupid w3schools was the first hit. The official library reference documentation on python.org (which was what I was looking for) didn't turn up until nearly the bottom of the 2nd page of search results!! Beyond frustrating.
If there is a pattern it doesn't recognize, you end up on the MDN search results page.
edit: More info. about how it works is available here: https://github.com/tayler/tomdn
DDG also has !bangs for this specific purpose and !mdn does, as expected, lead you to MDN.
Bangs are great, just shorter again to use tomdn.com: - `!mdn array.map` leads me to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=array.map, which I have to scan the results and click on. - tomdn.com?array.map leads me to the exact page in the docs. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Javascript/Refe...
This may or may not be valuable, but I like saving the extra steps for something I do many times a week. Basically this calculation (https://xkcd.com/1205/) works out for me + the fun of working on a new project.
edit: >I don't have to run my searches through an unknown third party
Very sympathetic to this concern. Feel free to host yourself -- it's a single html file. https://github.com/tayler/tomdn
Not surprised it shows higher than the actual spec. I think the HN community is just getting to the greybeard stage (I'm still cutting out grays), and this is our version of JUST READ THE MAN FILE
It has. It is nowhere near the quality of MDN, but also nowhere nearly as bad as it used to be.
W3Schools has less information than MDN. This is bad for the experienced, but a relief for people who are entering the trade.
As an example, consider an inexperienced web developer that wants to do something when a button is clicked. They google for it and find these two pages:
- https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp . Right there in the middle of the page is an example snippet that will get the job done. If I scroll down I see other ways to do it, all of them fully contained (i.e.: I can copy-paste it to some website and they will work).
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/cli... . There's a table of things I don't understand (Bubbles? Cancellable?), two lengthy discussions about weird edge cases in some browsers, and (finally!) a single not-so-simple example that is not even enclosed in <script> tags.
What website do you think they'll pick?