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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

They've corrected most of the bad sample code.

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.

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).

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 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.

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

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