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Comment by claudiulodro | Hacker News Reader

I agree, these are the best JS docs around. I hope they continue maintaining them. The main alternative is W3 Schools, which is substantially worse (I blame their for-profit ad-supported business model, which doesn't necessarily incentivize thoroughness and depth)

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I am constantly surprised to see Google ranking W3 Schools so highly. Does anyone know how they have managed to be ranked so high up?

It’s decent for beginners with easy to follow tutorials and examples, but once you start getting in the weeds of JS, it’s not as useful I feel like.

Domain Age - They've been around forever with tons of materials.

Quality - good enough for most things. The newer stuff is not that bad and usually more practical(read quicker to grok for someone in a hurry) that the more thorough MDN docs.

Dirty trick - association with w3 standards body (none in reality)

They used to be really bad. Their quality has significantly increased over the past years. I will use w3schools for quick info, but MDN when I really want in-depth information.

https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/ is much more comprehensive, and sadly very few ever read it.

Lots of functionality in the spec that isn't even possible to find on MDN or W3 Schools.

Not sure whether it's fair to compare them. Specifications are usually written using a format language for the ones who implement them and not designed to be a learning material, so many things which are not necessary for this goal are omitted. On the other hand references like MDN are dedicated to the end user, written with a regular language and unnecessary details removed but also with additional explanations and usage examples which are really helpful. So one usually doesn't need to refer to the specification unless there are reasons to do it(e.g. need to understand all the aspects of a feature). It's pretty hard to understand what's written there for a beginner without some context which provided by manuals like MDN.

Be sure to read https://tc39.es/ecma262/ instead of the one hosted on ecma-international.org that has up to a year's worth of unfixed bugs.

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