Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by 12907835202 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

12907835202

I've never quite understood the w3schools hate. It can be quite useful.

My most used page is this one when I need to jog my memory: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php

It's much better than this one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selecto...

Or any of the other results on the first page

View on HN

It often outranks MDN official docs which these days are very readable, in-depth, with examples, and a simple UI and the only time I click to inappropriately named W3Schools is by accident because it's the top result and I'm expecting MDN and then I click back and that's why I don't like it.

I have similar feelings about baeldung.com. It isn't that the content is inherently bad, but it is super annoying that when I search for a java class the first few results are from baeldung instead of the official javadocs.

How wonderful to differ - I actually love bite sized, "tldr" or baeldung and almost always get what I need. (not to mention that quite often javadocs of many project are just empty or severely lacking... )

I think the java official docs are rarely explanatory, they are just plain description with a lot of fluff and useless information

Yeah. Search for class, open official docs, read very short description. And still have absolutely zero idea is where this class is used, and how it should be created, and what alternatives.

Nothing about that makes w3 a poor source. I get why you block it - so MDN is shown first. That’s fair. Im just saying its not a fault of W3. Because I tend to agree with that guy. W3 really isnt bad. A bit simplistic, and MDN is better, but its not bad.

> Nothing about that makes w3 a poor source.

I'm sure you meant w3schools but w3.org is where a lot of the official documentation for web technologies is and not affiliated with w3schools.

Yeah the simplicity is what I prefer about W3schools. A lot of times I want a quick code example and don’t really want to go in depth about how something works.

W3 has a bad reputation because, at least a long while ago, it was rife with blatantly false or misleading information.

There's literally working code demos for everything on the site that's front-end or client-side.

Yes, and historically those code demos were often wrong in many important ways (like not working in all browsers, or insecure). They are much better now but reputation is hard to recover.

That must have been like 12 years ago or more at least because in my career I don't have much memory of feeling betrayed by the information on their site.

It's exactly 12 years ago. I started learning JavaScript in summer 2011 and I remember w3school was often misleading.

Yes some people have been doing web development for more than 12 years (:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.co...

Wouldn't that have been the case everywhere before JS browser support standardized to ES 2015 and above?

It's a question of presentation. Back then (and to be clear, I'm talking about 00s here) the correct way was to point out that something might not even be doable in cross-browser way at all, and listing the proprietary features that'd let you do it in specific browsers while clearly labeling them as proprietary. Quality websites would do that, while w3schools and the likes would just give you the snippet for (usually) IE. Worse yet, in many cases they would keep suggesting the old proprietary approach even after a new standardized way of implementing something showed up.

Cross-platform demos?

That's why Kagi's personalization is so cool here. Kagi doesn't have to block it, and neither does the user. The user can just lower it, and raise MDN, because that's what they want in their search, and it helps them more.

From what I understand a lot of it is residual. W3schools has always been directed at beginners, but it also used to be wrong rather frequently.

This site [0] used to be the hub for the hate and now has a message saying that w3schools has gotten better. If you're curious, they still have a link to the web archive that has all the mistakes documented.

The most egregious of their mistakes to me:

> […] professional web developers often prefer HTML editors like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, instead of writing plain text.

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

W3Schools was essential in helping me get to where I am today. Learning HTML and PHP through it was great, my favorite feature being their "Try It Yourself" button, which opens up a sandbox where you can play around with PHP, HTML, CSS, JS etc (note it's not just client-side languages like MDN does). For beginners, this kind of thing is essential, and this was before MDN was good. And even now, I compare MDN vs. a W3Schools page, and the overall design and content is more welcoming for beginners.

As others have said, it's t least in part because of the beginner orientation. I'm not a web developer and I found it useful when looking up some html/css stuff for a project years ago. But for example in python I find it infuriating to see geeksforgeeks or whatever at the top of my search results. I want SO or documentation for most stuff and consider the rest spam.

All that to say, I think beginner oriented well SEO'd content is going to be polarizing, which makes Kagi's approach great for everyone, if you want it it's there, if it annoys you, quickly block it

w3schools used to be one of the best resources ~15 years ago. Today I intuitively avoid it because

1. The ads make the fan on my laptop spin (I prefer to avoid ad-heavy websites over using adblock)

2. The 'Try it yourself' button is fake. It doesn't actually run the code and doesn't let you edit it.

3. It is not a good reference. To give an example, the last time I visited w3schools was upon searching "react ul li", which landed me on the page https://www.w3schools.com/react/react_lists.asp . Ironically, the reason why I was searching the term, was to find advice on setting the "key" prop in on list items. The w3schools example doesn't even mention the prop and produces errors. Compare that to the official reference which ranks much lower in Google search: https://react.dev/learn/rendering-lists#where-to-get-your-ke... .

my 2 cents:

w3schools tend to oversimplify the concepts to the point of technical inaccuracy.

and the tone of the articles read more like tutorials instead of reference manuals.

Yeah MDN is the de-facto reference guide for web frameworks. W3schools feels like beginner tutorials. For me, I want “what happens if I pass undefined as the second arg to this function” and w3schools doesn’t answer that. It’s fine as a site, I suppose, it was insane when it outranked more complete websites. Off topic I see this more and more with Stackoverflow where semi-related questions outrank official docs.

In the 2000s, it was very often egregiously wrong. People remember.

I learned from w3schools in the early 2000s, and helped instruct my high school web design course with it.

I wish I hadn't. There were many innacuracies, outdated advice, and over simplifications.

I came up on a slew of weird and inconsistent sources, and that bit me when discussing things in college. I often felt over confident because of these type of sites.

W3schools (used to at least) gave a very shallow intro to programming languages (PHP, ASP, etc), and I remember a professor basically laughing at me once because of that misinformation.

So, maybe others had experiences like mine.

EDIT

They also had these weird "certifications" for technologies that were basically really dumbed down quizzes. They were made to make people feel special, I think. Dunno, I did them all, and I almost got laughed out of class.

I'm also a fan of the CSS selectors page, but it's an exception. Especially for JS stuff, MDN is usually better.

It used to be worse. But overall I agree with you. Its accurate albeit often a bit simplistic.

Yep. W3schools is one of those sites that helped me begin my career. I still find it useful to look up something in a hurry. No idea why so many people hate it.

w3 schools is on several of those lists, including "raise", so your opinion is shared by others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com