A Plea to New Communities

Ryan Baxter — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:57:00 -0700

Mark Pilgrim, a Technical Writer at Google, explains his new project, Google DocType.

According to Mark, Google DocType will be an open resource for sharing web programming knowledge. As of today, it contains HOWTO articles on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation, and Web security. Links to CSS and HTML references round out the site’s content. I have no doubt that DocType is just the beginning for Google, but will this be just another W3Schools?

In numerous posts on codinghorror.com, Jeff Atwood has suggested that programmers no longer read books. Jeff believes the Internet is most programmers’ first reference choice. He has since announced a partnership with Joel Spolsky to create a community for developers. In his words:

There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums, buried in online help, or hidden away in books that nobody buys any more. We’d like to unlock all that. Let’s create something that makes it easy to participate, and put it online in a form that is trivially easy to find.

My plea to both of these fledgling projects is best stated in the last sentence of the above quote. Please make the information trivially easy to find. I’m one of those developers using the Internet as a programming reference and I’m tired of searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t the only answer. Too many times keywords return results containing solutions for yesterday’s problems. What worked yesterday may not be today’s answer. Operating systems, software dependencies, and programming languages all change. How do we keep content relevant? Unfortunately I don’t have an answer to this problem, but perhaps Mark, Jeff, or Joel can come up with something profound. I wish them luck.

crunchlife: A Plea to New Communities

A Plea to New Communities