I see the effort behind this project but I have to admit that I find it a bit useless. I've never had any problems finding anything related to jquery's documentation. I simply google and the top3 results is practically always the official documentation, a great stackoverflow answer, or a blog explaining in detail what I'm looking for.
But, maybe it's just the way I work; I can understand that other developers might prefer to have a great resource that they can look up instead of randomly searching google.
However, something I've struggled a little more related to jquery is finding and using the plugin. The official plugin website is really not optimal and it's hard to find the "best" plugin when you're looking for something.
I guess an unofficial jquery plugin website where you could easily:
1- Find a couple of plugin that do what you want
2- Let you try the demo as fast as possible
3- Let you glance over the code, see comments and rating of others developers.
4- Have an easy and clear: Crash 30 sec installation
5- Give an access to the documentation.
This is the order I usually execute when searching for a jquery plugin.. it's just that each of those steps are sometime unnecessary hard. I.e. multiple versions on the jquery, hard to find the real website of the plugin, have to look github issues to see other comments, demo page not working or deprecated, hard to see the "Installation and quick example", etc.
Yes, this is the real problem. The core jQuery documentation is nicely organized by category, and if I can't find something by browsing I can find it by using a Google search of the site.
The plugins though are a mess. Any category I click on seems to have a huge list of options, some of which are great and some of which are sort of half finished and abandoned. Even if anyone could submit anything for display on the site, it might be nice to have an additional organizational layer on top that only shows a curated set of plugins. I just find something like http://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ easier to browse through. I think most of the organizational concepts between the sites are the same, but there just seems to be less cruft there.
Absolutely agree. It's quite funny, when you google something like "jQuery lightbox plugin", you will actually see (spammy) results like "30 Efficient jQuery Lightbox Plugins", as if for some reason I need to know about 30 different plugins that do the same thing...
I'd love to see a site as described, especially if it integrated with GitHub to tell me which plugins are more active/maintained, more often forked, etc. That information, in addition to reviews and usage examples would be amaaazing
I really understand you point of view, since I guess I work in a similar manner.
Now, I may find the downloadable version of this project really useful when I have to work offline, which happens more often than I would like to.
Which got me thinking about how useful an offline version of google would be. Unrealistic or impossible?
What if you could download a "Google for JavaScript" where, based on lots of javascript developers query, you downloaded a cached version of the results and the websites?
I.e. It's easy to get the top 100000 queries containing javascript; you get the top20 links for every queries, you download those websites and compress that. I don't know how big that'd be. I'm sure it'd be possible to use that in a clever way and make it small enough to be easy downloadable. A couple of gigs.. what's that for today?
Please don't give me a collapsed tree of things that I need to dig through while trying to mentally unravel what logic might have been going through your head when you put things in various places.
Give me a list. Of everything.
Or, if you absolutely feel you have to categorize things, give me a single "Uncollapse this mess" button so that I can look for the thing I'm looking for.
"unravel what logic might have been going through your head when you put things in various places." -> This is the official documentation; those categories are not the author's choice but the ones chosen by the jquery team.
That would make no sense to have a list of 1000 random items not being categorized; just use the search.
When you say "To use the search, I need to know what I'm looking for". Well, usually, when you search the documentation, it's because you know what you're searching for.. right?
But then, I get that you might not know the "best keywords" to search what you're looking for. And, for that, it's so better to have smart category rather than a list of 1000 items.
I mean, you're searching a way to post things using Ajax. You can search for ajax, you can search for post.. but you can quickly look at the categories and see Ajax; and then, instead of browsing through 1000 items, you only have to read a dozen.
A problem exists when you dont know what you want, then you dont know the keywords or the category. And the questions you might ask about the problem migth seem completley irrelevant to what you are trying to do.
I have been in such positions when learning JSF, seemingly simple things like getting out a request parameter where not obvious, and when googling "request parameter JSF" and all kinds of tricks I still did not get a satisfying answer, only after reading more about JSF I realized it is just the wrong thing to do any way.
If you're in such a position, you dont know what to search for but you think you have a problem, then it is time to pick up a book and study.
Pretty cool. Could do with some tweaking and polishing still though.
Should be valid html. Back button is broken. There should be a home button top left. The colours need tweaking for contrast, and I'm guessing other accessability tweaks.
url search does not work. For example the url: http://jqapi.com/ajax returns 404. Really it should do a search for ajax and take me to that page or list search results.
Interesting. My whole take was completely the opposite.
Browsers tend to have very little problem rendering invalid markup, and the savings costs associated with invalid markup (bandwidth, time, etc.) are very easily enumerated. So I would pose you this question:
What's wrong with invalid HTML, besides lack of some enigmatic adherence to idealism?
> and the savings costs associated with invalid markup
> (bandwidth, time, etc.) are very easily enumerated.
Please, enumerate. I guess you are not aware that a lot of things you consider invalid are actually allowed in HTML: unquoted attributes, tags omission, etc. This was allowed even in HTML4, HTML5 gives us even more options there.
You could remove DOCTYPE (which is very short compared to HTML4 or XHTML versions), but then you'd throw your browsers to quirks mode, and that is a pain. The whole purpose of DOCTYPE in HTML5 is to force standards-compliant rendering mode, that's it.
And it only looks that browsers have little problems parsing invalid markup. Making sense of tag soup parsing (and making it consistent) was one of the major tasks for HTML5 people.
I suppose I'm referring more to 4.01, since 5, as far as I know, doesn't constitute the majority of websites. Things like nonstandard attribute tags and wrapping inline elements around block elements. These are what I thought of when I thought of "dated".
Majority of websites can be converted to 5 just by replacing doctype. Nonstandard attributed don't help you to save bytes though.
Also, from what I've seen sites which were built without even thought about validity and standards tend to be of much lover quality and hence are more bloated: lots of unnecessary div's, classes, wrappers, etc.
Ugh. It is unusable in my iPad, which I very often use for browsing documentation when working on my laptop. The keyboard pops up every time a menu is selected because they menu events automatically selects the search box.
I tried to leave feedback, but e User Voice overlay is also horridly broken on the iPad.
You're just supposed to use this page: http://api.jquery.com/browser/ It formerly used to be accessible at api.jquery.com but then they changed some things around to confuse developers...
This is the nicest documentation of any language I've ever used. The page loads, the cursor defaults to the search box, you type in what you are looking for and the browser hides searches that do not match and then you can use the arrow keys to go up and down then list to the one you want.
As for the problem trying to find "is" just type "is(" if you are looking for the method itself.
I've been using this last spring, initially as an offline reference when flying, etc. Since then, it's become my primary reference when working with jQuery. It's perfect for what I need: instantly looking up usage details for specific methods.
I would expect it to be more ironic if it did work with JavaScript disabled.
It's kind of hard to be a functional JQuery developer with JavaScript turned off all the time. It's like being a blind tour guide or a celibate porn star.
But, maybe it's just the way I work; I can understand that other developers might prefer to have a great resource that they can look up instead of randomly searching google.