Hacker News Reader

Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com