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Comment by nblavoie | Hacker News Reader

Good Bye w3schools.com ?

w3schools.com is a great resource.

I prefer it when I need a quick refresher on an HTML element because it's especially good for having short, simple examples I can copy and paste.

MDN tends to be verbose and technical. It's good when you need to know everything in detail, but often I need a quick refresher and a simple example and for that w3schools.com always seems to have better content.

Compare these two pages for input types:

https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_form_input_types.asp

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...

The MDN page is more complete, but reading it gives me a headache.

The whole point of documentation though is for it to be complete, technical and well explained. Not to have copy-pastable examples.

W3schools is neither good documentation or good examples though.

When I need to change a car's oil, I don't need a complete, detailed overview of the entire lubrication system. There is a place for all kinds of documentation, but exhaustive explanation is often less preferable to a quick "how do I do this."

I disagree, both are valuable. It all depends on what you need in the moment.

W3Schools is a decent introduction though.

When I was just starting out it was nice to be able to quickly look up the syntax of a basic JOIN SQL statement on w3schools.

the MDN example (unfortunately at the bottom of the page) is more correct by using a proper <label> tag with the <input> tag, while w3schools omits that detail, which makes it seem like plain text labels with <br> tags (yuck) after them are ok (label tags add accessibility among other things).

tl;dr: use <label>'s with <input>'s, not plain text labels, as MDN shows you to do.

Hi from one of MDN's writers!

So, we're aware that the examples being way at the bottom of the page are frustrating to a lot of people because of the usefulness of having a simple example you can learn from or even snag and use in your own code.

That's why we have work ongoing to not only place examples at the tops of pages, but to make the examples interactive so you can make changes to the code right on the page. There's some info about it here: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/interactive-editors-in-beta/....

I'm glad you approve of our use of <label> to correctly label inputs. We are not yet 100% consistent about this, but we're on the job!

I find w3schools a better reference for quick HTML element and CSS rule lookup, but I always go to MDN for Javascript stuff, especially the newer API's that came with HTML5.

Hopefully - and thank God :)

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