MDN Plus

I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to documentation for web development.

Probably not very often.

Next time you're flying across the pond, try coding (without bothering to subscribe to onboard wifi).

Also, it can be useful in places where steady internet is sketchy, which is a lot of places.

The folks at 100 rabbits [1] would be happy.

[1] https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html

Right, but I think those situations are far and few between. If you're a person who is regularly without internet access, there's probably better areas to work in than the web where you may need to deploy emergency fixes on short notice.

And regardless, it seems like offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase? It's not like the web is rapidly evolving at all times, with major updates being released annually. It's a good chunk of years before enough browsers are updated to support new APIs, so if you grabbed the current docs you'd probably be able to work with that for a while.

I use Zeal. You can have super fast internet, but having instant "pop up the python docs for this thing" along with searching while typing is a joy.

It's much more useful for specific API docs rather than general "how do I do X" stuff but it's very nice. Helps that you don't have to deal with scrolling through stuff like web3schools.

> offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase

Stingy me would just wget download the entire documentation if I anticipate that I might go offline.

Can't say I'll ever be okay with paying for documentation; I don't want that to catch on.

I use documentation sources like MDN (via Zeal) or Rust docs (via local files loaded in the browser) while offline not uncommonly—I might go for a few months without doing so, but then I might go for a week of accessing them offline daily. Knowing that I don’t depend on an internet connection for it is very desirable.

But even when I have an internet connection, offline versions of most of these sorts of resources load considerably faster, mostly because I’m in Australia and these resources are normally hosted from America. My experience is that Americans that have always been in America and then travel to the other side of the world are consistently surprised at how slow the internet is away from the USA—and it’s all about latency, not bandwidth.

But I am compelled to admit that the performance angle is fairly negligible for MDN: it’s one of the extraordinarily rare sites that actually loads fast, with nearby TLS termination and content distribution and evidently nothing too outrageous in their coding so that it can consistently load to completion on my admittedly fast laptop from a cold cache and no open connections in well under two second, regularly under one.

Since top sites on Google results (GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools etc..) are generally considered suboptimal, what are some good sites for 'how do I do X?' style articles?