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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Great, while they are at it can Google please downgrade the extremely spammy w3schools or at least allow me to remove certain websites from my searches. There are so many better resources out there...

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I've never understood the hate for w3schools. I've always found them to be extremely useful. I like that usage examples is the focus of their site. I find that more useful than wordy documentations that more advanced references provide.

http://www.w3fools.com/ top of the page summarizes the situation:

> When W3Fools was launched in 2011, the state of documentation for developers was poor. This site documented many content errors and issues with the W3Schools website. The Mozilla Developer Network was around but it did not have much support at the time.

> Today, W3Schools has largely resolved these issues and addressed the majority of the undersigned developers' concerns. For many beginners, W3Schools has structured tutorials and playgrounds that offer a decent learning experience. Do keep in mind: a more complete education will certainly include MDN and other reputable resources.

MDN would greatly benefit from more soft documentation and a playground setup similar to W3Schools

I'm still waiting for the true spiritual revival of HTML Goodies https://web.archive.org/web/19980130110903/http://htmlgoodie...

Or not. MDN usually suits me fine.

Actually, I find TutorialsPoint https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ generally pretty good, if not lacking in some depth. They give a decent soft intro, though.

I think if you tried to add that to mdn you’d make it worse at what it’s good for

At this point (trying to be a good citizen, not using an ad blocker) the ads on the site lock up my computer, and a simple lookup turns into a substantial time investment. Vs MDN doesn't have this issue.

How can you use the web without an ad blocker? Anytime I get on a browser without an ad blocker I'm reminded of how slow and horrible the web used to be (and apparently still is).

Yeah, MDN is akin to Unix man pages, W3Schools is more to the point.

They've corrected most of the bad sample code.

When I was a noob, w3schools was far more useful. I learned HTML and CSS on w3schools. Now I'm more of an expert, I need the detailed documentation that MDN has. Each site has its niche. Still sometimes reference w3schools because it's easier to read, though.

They aggressively create separate pages for every element and attribute, each full of ads, but hardly any containing substantive descriptions of the things they document. At worst they just restate the name of the attribute in different words. And the examples, while sometimes nice, often just show the effect of turning a property on or off and don't really demonstrate the different things you can do with it. If they focused more on substance and less on SEO, they could be a much better resource.

I'm surprised. This is the type of thing that should fall within the Panda update cross hairs. Thin content, heavy ads - Google should by design be favouring pages that aren't shooting for cheap long tail hits.

Wc3 is good as a reference to html or css syntax but I feel it's spread it's tentacles to far and wide. It's the first result when I search for a php method, and I don't feel it's nearly as good as the php manual

I use w3schools and MDN, both. w3schools improved a lot over the years, and it's easy to find something fast. MDN is more in depth. CanIuse.com is another very useful resource. Google should keep all three resources in the top results.

They were great in 2006 when I was learning, but they're not nearly as useful as MDN (even foregoing the accusations that w3schools is errant and spammy). It's simply annoying to have to manually filter the w3schools (and others) search results when MDN is sooo much better.

I’ll never/rarely click a w3schools link, but I do find MDN to be quite difficult to read with it’s pages being quite technical and terse. W3schools is quite pragmatic with providing a reference for CSS properties.

I hope these extra resources will let MDN improve on this.

Agreed. Even simple concepts can have overly technical examples on MDN. Sometimes it causes me to overthink a simple script.

I agree. I feel like going to MDN to quickly look up syntax is like trying to kill a fly with a handgun.

I’m quite the opposite, I feel like MDN is the only sane resource in an ocean of opinionated crap. Not saying it covers everything but for syntax it’s practically the only place I visit.

Same here. For syntax and quick examples, I find w3schools much harder to parse than MDN. Maybe there's more noise in w3schools, or maybe the layout/design of MDN are better for these purposes.

But going to w3schools is like trying to kill a fly with a flyswatter with a dashed red border of weight 2px. Their examples are so basic, pre-canned, and repetitious between pages that you rarely see useful options and intricacies that each tag/property may posses.

For super quick syntax checks ("Is it fill-opacity or opacity?") MDN might be a little overboard, but as any sort of reference beyond 3 line snippets it is the link that I always look for. I usually append MDN to the end of my searches for HTML/SVG help.

Exactly. Sometimes I just close MDN and then click on w3schools link for this reason.

Yeah. I treat w3schools vs MDN like Simple English Wiki vs regular Wikipedia. There's some subjects on Wikipedia (like math particularly) where to understand the wiki page, you need such a good background that you don't need the wiki page anyway. It's good to have a simpler, not complete place to get your feet wet first.

> or at least allow me to remove certain websites from my searches.

Im currently using a chrome extension from google[0] to do exactly this.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

Why is this supported through a Chrome extension?

Google is tracking everything about me. So I expect that certainly they can track which sites I don't like, especially when I mark them as such.

They use to for a short time, I don't recall if they ever said why they removed the feature from google search itself. This extension came after they removed it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=querySelectorAll+-site:w3sch...

this syntax has been supported for many years

I also like the "Personal Blocklist" extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

I think the parent meant to exclude some domains from every search. I would love that too. If I have to add "-site:somedomain.com" (and maybe even many of them!) it takes less effort ignore them in the result

Bookmark that. I use the following:

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&newwindow=1&num=30

I remove the ei identifier from the bookmark. I guess this is a unique ID that makes it possible for google to keep following me if I happen to bookmark it. Eg:

ei=Vo_n34buB9Cabdedfk6gO

And I happen to like the W3school examples, especially CSS. They've helped me many times. I don't see the problem with them, but please ignore them if you don't like it.

I find duckduckgo much better for these kind of searches. It also shows a brief instant result which is usually an excerpt from MDN.

Actually, I find duckduckgo better for all kinds of technical searches these days.

Their Stack Overflow integration is to me one of the best things that ever happened to search engines.

IMO W3schools has some of the best development tutorials for beginners

Some googlers made this w3fools, so employees certainly aren't fond of w3schools.

http://www.w3fools.com/

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