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Comment by tkahn6 | Hacker News Reader

> We certainly do not advocate that anyone use w3schools as a reference or place to learn techniques.

The way the criticism is presented is childish. W3Schools is the most accessible introduction to web technologies that I've ever seen. It assumes absolutely zero knowledge. When you're literally just starting out, this is a big deal. You don't give a damn about standards, you just want to create and make cool things to show to your friends. It's a jumping off place. Criticism of W3Schools as a reference I have no problem with; clearly there are extensive inaccuracies, but telling beginners to learn HTML/CSS/JS from MDC is equivalent to telling them to RTFM.

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Agreed. W3Schools gives really good examples.

Argh. Really?

More often than not, the only thing W3Schools gives "really good examples" of is how you should NEVER write code.

I can sympathize a bit with those who say that MDC has somewhat of a barrier-to-entry, but at the same time, learning stuff the WRONG way first is just as bad if not worse than not learning it at all. It's hard to break bad habits once they're in-grained, and w3schools tends to in-grain a lot of them in such a way that "students" have no idea that the code is horrible and that there is much more to JavaScript, and better ways to get the task done, than how it is presented on W3Schools.

I'll fully admit that JavaScript isn't the most straightforward language to learn - it's further hampered by the fact that it really is so easy to just jump right into it without knowing where to start, and then end up starting on the wrong foot. Perhaps the comments about MDC being hard to "get started" with are onto something, and perhaps we should strive to fix that as well (MDC is a wiki after all). But on the other end of the spectrum, we also need to make it harder to learn stuff that's horribly ill-advised or just plain wrong.

I don't think this is an issue, actually. Developers and hackers are faced with the need to learn new technologies or programming languages every now and then, that have different philosophies or ways of doing things, and hence different standards of quality. Writing idiomatic and good Python code is not equal to writing idiomatic and good C.

So, what makes a good developer is, in my opinion, the capacity to re-learn, to specifically break bad habits. Let's face it, we've all learned (and still learn) crappy techniques first. If anything, people who wanted to learn it the RIGHT way from the start, that I've met, tended to get bogged down in dogmatism of a specific technology or design idea, unable to see the benefits of other ways of doing things.

In the end, if a person who has learned at W3Schools can't recognize some of the things he has learned as inefficient or false, then this person clearly chose the wrong calling to pursue.

This document was an unfinished working draft.

Don't finish it.

Awww. you hurt my feelings. :(

Agreed again. I always go back to w3schools as a quick hit reference for little things I may forget.

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