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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Okay, you have to admit them tagging all the classes with a W3- prefix is kind of funny. Looks like their SEO spam approach leaked out to their framework also.

But I agree with most people, this site will never recover from its poor reputation. And that’s also their business model.

We can only hope Google will eventually tone down how much their site appears in search queries for topics they provide no in-depth information for.

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All css frameworks really should prefix their classes so you can mix them.

And I hope that Google keeps showing them in search results, because while MDN is great for in-depth information, most of the time I just need a quick reference of common attributes, and no I don't want it cluttered with a bunch of in-depth information when I am just trying to see what the correct word for something is and how to spell it.

Both W3 and MDN are valuable resources for different use cases.

>All css frameworks really should prefix their classes so you can mix them.

I don't believe that would work out.

Why not? Using prefixes to create a "namespace" is a well-established practice in CSS. I'm not sure there's much of a point in doing it to use multiple frameworks, but there's really no reason it wouldn't work.

That's a standard practice in languages that don't have namespaces. C and Emacs Lisp have both proven to be "working out" for decades despite using prefixes instead of namespace support.

I mean, you are more than welcome to share a subjective opinion. "In-depth" in this context means actual relevant content and not a few lines of text. Yeah, sure, one-liners are great and I myself have to Google them all the time because I forget the different variables that shorthand's can take, but W3Schools is on another level when it comes to this.

They inherited their authority from a time when content on the web was sparse and thin as a rail. The argument here is not that they don't provide _any_ useful information, the argument is that the inherited authority is making them first results for queries were they obviously should not be first.

I don't believe there is anything obvious about it.

I think the way W3 lays out information is likely better for beginners. And MDN is likely better for the average professional developer.

So the question is who makes the most searches for those subjects.

That said, I do actually see MDN as the first result for some searches.

I hope you’re so wrong.

W3 schools is a wonderful, excellent site.

Dropping w3- in front of their classes is so you can drop it in anywhere. It’s actually rather brilliant and has been helpful in many cases for me.

I don’t get the w3 schools hate-flex. Programmers judge other programmer choices too much.

W3 school's previous focus on SEO over accuracy is pretty well known. If you break your users' or audience's trust, it turns out that can have lasting impact.

I might be accused of ageism, but honestly, I think the ratio of young and very young programmers to mature ones is what makes for all the tribalism and drama within the community. Of course, there are old folks who still behave like they're in high school. I think it's a nature of the profession to attract such people, so we won't ever be completely free of them, but from my observation - most older (since when 40+ is old, right...) programmers tend to be much more level-headed and way less emotional with regards to tools they use.

There is of course that nuclear option of blocking the site entirely on search results using a browser addon. I block w3schools, Pinterest, and a bunch of GitHub/stackoverflow scrapers, and didn't miss a thing.

Also to me this looks like a SEO operation to have their stuff linked/quoted in a lot of beginners websites.

> But I agree with most people, this site will never recover from its poor reputation. And that’s also their business model.

They don't care of reputation, they care about 1st places in google queries :)

It doesn't look funny. CSS doesn't have namespaces.

> I agree with most people

Taking the thread as a representative dataset, it seems like a pretty even split.

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