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.
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.
Comments
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
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
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?