W3Fools Takes on W3Schools
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
I guess it's easier to hate and claim to be taking the high ground than it is to actually put forth an effort to make the state of things better-which says more about them than it does W3Schools, and probably says a lot about human nature in general, really.
W3Schools is not without its many and varied problems, both in content and, as others have said, its own code base, but so is nearly every other tutorial or web programming site on the internet that's more than, say, a year old. The 'net is litered with old content that often can be difficult for new developers to filter out and know what's good and what's not. Just look at the volume of old, horrible PHP tutorials floating around, or even old Rails code. The main difference is that a lot of people will see W3Schools and assume it is associated with the W3, so they might take it as being a more reliable source.
I'm not sure how actively W3Schools is updated, but if they have a staff maintaining it and actively develop and write content for the site and they're not replacing the old with the new, then yes, that's just lazy and they should be doing better, but tutorial sites containing old, bad code and coding practices is certainly nothing unique to W3Schools.
The problem is that W3Schools dominates the search results. If you search for "html colors", guess which website is at the top. This happens for much of the faulty pages as well.
I don't know how long you think it took ( https://github.com/paulirish/w3fools ) but it took a couple of hours of time from a few people over about a week.
I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a lot longer than a week.
And just because the creators didn't build a clone of w3schools, doesn't mean they aren't contributing useful information back to the various communities affected by the nonsense published at w3schools. Every single one of them are writing blog posts and submitting to open source projects, hosting podcasts, helping on IRC channels and forums, and building helpful websites to learn exactly the same stuff found on w3schools, except with valid information.
The creators of w3fools have no issue with the other resources that are available that they suggested as alternatives. For more specific beginner data, there are numerous walkthroughs and helpful answers littered across the internet with the correct information in them. Creating yet another site that puts together tutorials isn't what is needed. They want the beginners to be able to have a fair chance at good knowledge. Creating a site to slowly gain google juice over the next two years does nothing to help people today. Until w3schools stops showing up first for every "___ Tutorial" search in existence, the job of making it a notoriously questionable resource will do way more good than building a shadow site would do. If at least you are somewhat aware that you should fact check the things that you learn there.
I find it a little bit troublesome that the group that follows 'hacker' news is so willingly supportive of blatant technical misinformation. You can nitpick about some of the things that are brought up, but as a whole, it's ridiculous that the number one resource for technical information is so wildly out of touch with reality. You can question the method that this was brought up, but you should still have the desire to see good information in the wild.
And finally, yes, there are other out of date websites that have tutorials on them, but they don't show up first in google, and they don't sell certifications based on their misinformation to unknowing people who don't realize that the certifications mean absolutely nothing (and are potentially detrimental). Get mad at whoever you want, but objectively speaking, the site is a disservice to the community, regardless of it's ease. Getting bad information is _always_ easy.
That one collaboratively edited directory of peer-reviewed resources would create a one-stop-shop for people looking for the best material on a specific topic or niche. By web developers for web developers.
Put those collection of related resources on MDC if you must (you say it's editable by anyone, so all your collaborators can participate at will, and have an aged and already authority-status starting point right on your doorstep).
One of the hardest things is to find resources for the beginner that teaches them high quality web development from scratch. Create a map for others and lead the way.
That I feel is a far more constructive approach than this angst-ridden site you've spawned. And it has a more immediate benefit of linking to existing and already indexed material on the web, and add/aggregate more authority.
A link from the zeldmans, heilmanns, sharps & blawsons and malarkey's of the web development community, and the reach they all have to a multitude of web developers can quickly give a high-quality curated resource a starting boost towards ranking the right material higher.
Since if all your collaborators are already heavily involved in creating web materials covering the subjects W3schools teaches, then there's already a set of authoritative sites existing. Those can all point to your master curation site, and consequently pass on existing google juice to those materials that exist and are fit for purpose.
Taking off W3schools from Google only promotes result number 2 up to the first place - is that really an improvement?
I don't think anyone here is saying that W3Schools is tits, or that it disseminates valid tutorials or code.
I'm a little confused as to why W3Schools is being singled out among many crap tutorial sites. I know that you claim Google placement and bullshit certifications are your driving reasons, but I have a little trouble believing that.
The Internet is organic, and the very fact that W3Schools still exists today is more of an indicator that nothing better exists. W3Fools isn't webstandards.org and you're not Zeldman.
You've possibly wasted your time creating a site that ridicules rather than one that educates. Your site begs for applause from the knowing and shows up dead last for a user looking for quick tutorials.
> I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a lot longer than a week.
Most everyone would agree with that, but you gave yourself your own deadline, no? Who said W3Fools had to launch at a specific date? And why? W3Fools could have been called HitTheGroundRunning.org and started off with CSS3 or HTML5 tutorials. A month or so in and you'd have a real thoughtful and useful resource. Then scaled up based on user feedback.
I've seen a lot of aggression against w3schools but this is worse. An angry rant website. So much nitpicking. So much tantrums. They seem not to be interested in making w3schools better but want to destroy them.
From w3fools:
The markup of the W3Schools site itself is awful and does not conform to best practices: table in table in table in table, with lots of inline styles.
Completely irrelevant. Don't shoot the messenger.
I use what my search engine gives me. w3schools is usually on top. I learned a lot from w3schools and sometimes even directly go to it for reference.
edit: Apparently there was a previous discussion here, on a draft version. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082089
The site is horrible. Period.
> Completely irrelevant. Don't shoot the messenger.
Aha. Well, if they can't even get their own site right, why should I listen to them in the first place?
Sorry, but that's like hiring a Web Design whose own Web Site consists of nothing more than yellow 20px Comic Sans text on a blue background that uses a million blink tags.
They don't claim to be web designers. The web site is easy to use and a great resource for beginners. Their XPath tutorial was much better than other tutorials when I needed to get a quick start a couple of years ago.
The table discussion is irrelevant to the users. Most of them never look at the source code and is interested in the actual tutorials. If table based layout invalidates a site, you should stop using Google, HN and Stack Overflow...
Yep a great resource, for wasting a ton of precious time in which they could have learned how to do things right instead of using techniques from ca. 2000.
> ...interested in the actual tutorials.
Which are still the worst part of the site.
Example (just clicked on one of their JS tutorials):
> JavaScript statements can be grouped together in blocks. > Blocks start with a left curly bracket {, and ends with a right curly bracket }. > The purpose of a block is to make the sequence of statements execute together.
Pure BS. JavaScript has no block scope. {} aren't needed for "executing stuff together".
Another thing they tell people is that "var foo = 2;" and "foo = 2;", are equal, more BS.
> If table based layout invalidates a site...
There is a difference in using a table layout because it's a good choice (Google doesn't validate in any way, the just want to cut down traffic, which makes sense for them) and just using it because, well... because one has no better idea.
> JavaScript can be used to validate data - A JavaScript can be used to validate form data before it is submitted to a server. This saves the server from extra processing
Sure! Always trust the client :)
I'm in no way advocating client-side-only validation, but form validation on the client side to clean up mistakes can save a server round trip and a page reload, and so could save server side processing.
EDIT: just to clarify, I don't mean to turn this into a discussion with further nitpicking. I just thought your quote and comment were representative of some of the W3Fools content; picking a quote and interpreting it to mean what you want it to mean, and then criticizing it on that basis.
But w3schools is read by beginners, they don't have any clue about web security whatsoever, if you don't tell them everything they will just go with the few things that you've told them.
w3fools.com isn't relatively better (compared with web development best practice at it's release, with the web development prevailing wisdom when w3schools.com launched).
There are a litany of errors and mistakes in their own markup, so their quote of "W3Schools should both hold itself to, and be held to, the highest standards." is ironic - w3fools.com don't hold themselves up to these highest standards.
Also ironic is the statement that W3Schools.com don't link to the "specs" (they mean W3C Recommendations, which aren't specifications or specs) - yet looking through that long page there's no obvious link to the very same Recommendations. Surely that's not a difficult or time-consuming thing to do?
Their markup needs a good polish and refactor. It's littered with examples:
* lack of accessibility appreciation,
* non-understanding of descendent selectors in CSS,
* the difference between emphasis and strong,
* ignorance of CSS pseudo selectors,
* lack of properly thought-out heading structure,
* lack of appreciation as to what role="main" means,
* marking up a series of paragraphs as an ordered list,
* hiding asides and further information in HTML comments,
* misunderstanding of what is and isn't UTF-8,
* editorial changes to cited comments not marked up,
* blockquotes lacking proper citation (in either of the two possible semantic approaches),
* code fragments not marked up with code tags,
* use of accesskeys,
* lack of consistency over how an ellipsis is added to a page - they are using 4 different methods in one page,
* using markup for a presentational effect instead of using appropriate logical markup,
* lack of appreciation of "fragment" in document fragment identifiers.
* And 2005 just called, they want their clearfix class back.
As an example of best practice, their one page site falls below an acceptable level.
Their message is useful - as is parts of W3Schools - but they are repeating the same mistake.
Plus the overbearing righteous indignation that comes across in the largely copied and pasted mailing list isn't the right tone or approach. It's quite easy to pick apart nits in a site, it's quite another to demonstrate the ability to correctly explain the better ways of developing.
This is no better than the anti-Internet Explorer rants. A negative slight at things because it's cool.
The best way to usurp w3schools from the top of Google results is to write better content and share your wisdom. That however will involve bringing together a community focused on providing constructive and positively instructional material - that's something I'm unconvinced that the people behind w3fools.com can accomplish. There's already too much negativity and indignation in the site itself for any of it's creators to improve their credibility.
Unless W3Fools puts up a credible alternative (the open wiki demand is unlikely to be entertained for an instant) then the war would seem to over just as the first shots are being fired.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference
Granted, the HTML reference doesn't have by attribute directory.
- Working examples. W3Schools leads with them - Mozilla doesn't seem to have any.
- The 'try it yourself' feature. Nothing cements learning like playing around with the concepts for yourself.
compare the img entry for both:
The Google videos are great tutorials for beginners.
And when you want to get down and dirty with the specifics and specs, the W3C, Opera, and Mozilla docs are there to help.
There's absolutely no reason to use W3Schools considering the awful amount of inaccuracies and rotten advice they teach to people starting out.
You don't see facebook making a site showing why myspace sucks. You don't see google or bing making a site showing how yahoo sucks. Create the quality content and let your site speak for itself.
With tutorial sites like tryruby and railsforzombies (and HN just had a javascript one also), there is definitely a higher standard of tutorial that one could aim for. Just do it or shut up already.
This does seem to be a pretty common misconception. I've seen quite a few beginners on StackOverflow, etc type of sites pointing at W3Schools as if they were the last word for something.
"W3Schools" was a pretty clever choice of name I guess...
"I linked to W3Schools' JavaScript tutorial in our 6 Free JavaScript E-Books and Tutorials post. I never came across the tutorials from Google, Mozilla or PromoteJS while doing my research for that post. I just checked, and although W3Schools' JavaScript tutorial still comes up as the top search result for "JavaScript Tutorial" none of the sites W3Fools lists were found in the first 10 pages of results for a search for "JavaScript Tutorial." This shows the uphill battle other tutorial writers face when competing with W3Schools."
So the W3Schools tutorial is #1 on Google, while Mozilla's vastly superior guide is buried. Right, that makes sense.
Exhibit A for Google's broken ranking algorithm.
FAIL.