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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/4/w3.css (evidently from December 2020)

I think of w3schools as largely SEO spam, though sometimes I have found useful answers when they come up as the first hit. Is that the general perception?

(I should add I don't use css professionally)

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As a non-webdev, I was always surprised that the World Wide Web consortium released such poor educational material.

So, today I learned that W3schools and W3C were not related! That is... easy to mix up I think?

It's deliberate on the part of W3schools.

And one of the many criticisms.

I always thought so too, but I think what's actually going on is that MDN is like an engineering professor, and w3schools is like a high school shop teacher. The former gives you information that is more correct and deeper but can linger too long on technical minutiae. The latter has a more superficial understanding of technicalities but a stronger grasp of practicalities and how to get things done. This characterization seems mostly fair from what I'm reading in this thread (beginners prefer w3schools, seasoned hackers prefer MDN), and it may well be that w3schools doesn't even need to do any advanced SEO hacking to overtake MDN because amateur web devs outnumber veteran professional web devs.

I think this is spot on.

I am a back-end developer, so any front-end dev I do is on hobby projects, and for that w3schools pretty much has the answers needed to get things done. For back-end related stuff like headers or response codes I do go to MDN, but that is because if I need to look it up it's because I need detailed information.

SEO spam seems to be more annoying than ever. Maybe Google doesn't work as well as it used to. Google values waffly, padded out, diluted content rather than brevity and succinctness. Try finding a recipe and you'll end up reading paragraphs about farmers markets and the cultural origins of the food rather than how to actually cook it!

Nowadays i just Wikipedia ,and look at reference and external link sections

w3schools has gotten better over the years[1]. I use MDN for almost everything, but I do mistakenly click the first result on Google Search which is usually w3schools. You can use this handy site to have the "I am feeling lucky" Google experience while searching for any web related queries. Example: mdn.io/flexbox

[1]: https://www.w3fools.com/

No, what happened with w3fools is that someone realized that it was not “politically correctly” so they picked out a couple of “fixed” examples and said “never mind it’s fine now.”

The reality is that w3schools is low quality spam and it will never change.

That’s my experience and perception, too.

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