Hacker News Reader

Comment by OzyM | Hacker News Reader

Could someone explain why they're hated? I don't know much about E3, but used them a few times without issue

I am not sure of the current state of affairs, but in the past (5-10 years ago or longer) w3schools was known for having outdated or sometimes flat out wrong information. They often rank or ranked higher than MDN which is usually the best and most comprehensive source on the subject. So a front end dev would typically want to always see MDN over w3schools.

My w3schools workaround is appending `mdn` to any search for something related to web standards

I have been part of the beta test for kagi search engine (kagi.com) and my favorite feature is you can prefer/mute websites. So for example I prefer MDN so the site is ranked higher if it shows in the search results. Note I’m unaffiliated with them but the product/team is great so rooting for them to succeed.

I'm using Kagi at the moment and not only does it have nice features like this but it is also a fantastic search engine.

Maybe the best way to explain how fantastic it is is that I think it has a bang operator like DDG but I have never tested it because when I look at the results they are obviously better than DDG or Google.

I love the preference idea... I'm going to implement that in my personal search engine.

pretty much.

their contents was never the best or most relevant back then. but they gamed SEO to position themselves higher than most. they are doing better today? good for them. for some of us who have witnessed the whole thing happen, they will be ignored for a long time.

^^^ this basically.

They’re the best resource for learning web technologies. They’ll tell you in one plain sentence what you need to know, with simple, concrete examples, whereas MDN, on the other hand, is a baroque mess which, after paragraph upon paragraph of rambling legalize will often leave you more confused than when you started.

For learning, they're OK. However, most of the time when you're doing real work, what you really want is specs and complete APIs. At that point w3schools in the results becomes a distraction. I'm totally blocking them.

That's exactly my experience too. I've learnt so much from w3schools. Also being able to quickly try stuff out and tinker with it and see the effect instantly is so handy.

Yeah, as someone (re)learning modern CSS/HTML, I really don't understand the hate they get. For a beginner (at CSS/HTML anyway, I'm an HPC engineer otherwise with lots of low-level experience), I think it's a great resource, with good examples too.

I can only assume they used to be different?

In terms of the site design itself, it's always been like that - the w3schools site has always had the clean, readable presentation (and it's a pretty easy argument to make that it's much more approachable for a newbie than MDN). The main complaint was with the content. In the past there were some pretty big problems with content on w3schools. Often common footguns (of which there are many in Javascript) were not covered and newbies were encouraged to do things that were bad in the short and long term. IIRC one of the more egregious examples of this was sample code that taught developers to write code vulnerable to SQL injection. Supposedly most of this has been fixed, though I don't really use w3schools that much so I can't really vouch for its integrity or lack thereof these days.

They used to publish vulnerable code as examples without any context. For example...

XSS: https://web.archive.org/web/20060722051641/http://www.w3scho... / https://web.archive.org/web/20060722073110/http://www.w3scho... / https://web.archive.org/web/20060722072840/http://www.w3scho...

Unauthenticated sessions: https://web.archive.org/web/20060716141638/http://www.w3scho...

MySQL injection: https://web.archive.org/web/20110412041949/http://www.w3scho...

Nothing directly wrong with this one but prepared queries were not well understood at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20060718041049/http://www.w3scho...

They were very easy to learn from and thus widely popular, but missed critical security context.

Exactly. I do coding for hobby, just html, css, js; & in past php too. If I quickly need to find some function to do xyz or a tag or property, or to find the capabilities of some function, its params, w3schools is easy to comprehend than mdn (which very rarely I have been to).

https://www.w3fools.com/ explains most of it but as explained it apparently mostly resolved the past issues

I think it's similar to PHP, they're criticized by the vocal newbies who are chasing the newest and shiniest.

For me personally, w3schools has been one of the most reliable sources of reliable solutions that work not just for the latest Chrome build but across many different browsers and platforms.

Given the cumulative nature of HTML, "outdated" is another word for "reliable and established", IMO.

They were much worse before. See the old version of w3fools website: https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.co...

They're better today, but it's still... let's say an equivalent of empty calories instead of a healthy MDN meal.

I don't see how MDN is a healthy meal when they document only shit which works exclusively in Chrome and Firefox, while claiming everything else is "deprecated" and ignoring all other browsers.

More like synthetic junk food, if you ask me.

Some examples would be useful, otherwise it's hard to tell what situations you're talking about.

But looking at a random entry, they list Samsung Internet, Safari, Opera, IE, and others. That doesn't look like ignoring other browsers.

Are any of those not WebKit?

IE is not WebKit.

Right...

Much lower quality information and shittier website than MDN yet they somehow outrank them on a ton of queries.

I've pretty much always prefix web related searches with "mdn" these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com