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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting pretty tired of these mindless defamations of W3schools. I get it - sometimes their resources are incorrect and they almost always use bad practices. But seriously, while you're busy being an elitist asshole slamming their website, the people at W3schools are busy teaching people the basics of web development.

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Exactly. It just seems to be fashionable to write a blog post bashing W3Schools, PHP etc. Yes, some of their content might have technical inaccuracies. Yes, the design is dreadful. But, when you're quickly looking to find out what are the different properties that text-decoration supports, W3Schools is pretty damn useful. It's very good both as a quick reference or for quickly learning the basics before diving into actual development.

Actually, if you read the article you would have seen that, in the end, I specifically said that it's possible that they are doing the most important things right (focusing on speed and accessibility).

And the fact that they are a good beginners resource doesn't make their own site's bad practices good practices. Even beginners know how to "view source".

w3schools is my go-to site for HTML, CSS, and javascript. I don't work with these technologies every day, so when I do I need a quick reminder, and w3schools provides just the right combination of succinct references and interactive example code. Really it's an essential resource.

The fellow who's so upset about their coding standards--I would suggest he visit their "Help us" page[1] and the "Forum" page[2] where he can contribute his expertise.

For a free, low-ad site, w3schools is remarkably useful. I hope this kind of article doesn't damage them too much. I'd be quite upset if they went away, or if they became more ad-heavy or subscriber-based to pay for all the fancy updates that he wishes they'd do.

1. http://www.w3schools.com/about/about_helping.asp

2. http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/

How hard would it be to work with them to fix their content and HTML instead ? Did anyone try to contact them to make their site better ?

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