Congratulations! It’s been good to see Mozilla doing more for, well, you know – the people who actually create the open web! I see endless “maker” and “badges” posts on Planet Mozilla but very rarely anything that is actually relevant to web developers, which just seems wrong. It’s good that Hacks has started to fill that obvious gaping hole.

On the other hand, whilst quality is critical of course, 350 articles in 2 years is less than 1 every 2 days. I’m hungry for more! In particular, more coverage of Firebug would be good instead of the more-frequent “look, Developer Tools has re-written another piece of the Firebug wheel”. Also, updates on how developer-friendly, but incomplete, resources are progressing. There’s lots of MDN articles which is great, but maybe a few updates on how that cross-browser, multiple-vendor open web documentation project is going? Can’t remember the name of it but I think it was an attempt to rewrite or improve upon http://caniuse.com/

I’d also love more articles about the progress of new standards. I think Hacks would be a better place for this than Google Groups, email lists or wherever discussion of standards development presumably currently takes place. Perhaps a “Last month in web standards” regular article?

I think it would be great to use the combined knowledge of all Hacks contributors to highlight the best of the third party libraries out there. Hacks is less relevant to everyday developers if it focuses too narrowly on cutting-edge features just rolled out in browser A or B when C doesn’t plan to support it for years, if ever. Instead, the most relevant tools for present day, active developers, are probably the compatibility-layer, cross-browser enabling tools like jQuery. For example, who wants to waste time, now and in the future, using libraries that aren’t likely to stay the course over time? Imagine you needed to go back to change a site that was written with Prototype/Scriptaculous now, when jQuery and perhaps MooTools pretty much won the critical mass race when it comes to compatibility libraries, and you’ve now forgotten all your Prototype/Scriptaculous foo. Of course it’s hard to predict the future but could you give it your best shot so us developers don’t end up going down a ‘legacy’ path?

Just a few ideas. Keep up the great work!

1. Robert Nyman [Editor]

   Thanks for the kind words about Hacks!

   On Developer Tools, the built-in Developer Tools in Firefox is what I’d recommend focusing on. If Firebug works for you, great, but it’s not the major objective for our Engineering team.

   On MDN and creating resources, I definitely agree. When we have enough progress that it’s worth sharing, we will do so.

   The new standards idea is good! I’ve been thinking on focusing more on what we implement in Firefox/Gecko, feature-wise, and hopefully with a good connection to standards.

   When it comes to compatibility, across-the-board support, we do cover that to some degree here on Hacks, but MDN and other possible resources that will come might be better suited for a more extensive overview and information of just that.

   Thanks for reading!

   October 2nd, 2014 at 06:01