Directory enquiries

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn���t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate ���content��� generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

It���s really, really, really hard work, andIt feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they���re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle ���I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you���re all set. But if you���re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don���t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey ���AI��� algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil���s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it���s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone���s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn���t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don���t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there���s no reason why one article couldn���t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There���s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there���d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of ���playlists��� of hand-picked articles. ���Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.���

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I���m just throwing this out there. I���d love it if someone were to run with it.