W3.css – A minimal alternative to Bootstrap

https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/default.asp

by aabbcc1241 • 4 years ago

206 130 4 years ago

I wonder how much smaller it could be if they drop IE

willio58• 4 years ago

Anytime I land on w3schools, I go back to google and click on the MDN link. This was a learned behavior that I don't even question now.

Has w3schools gotten any better over the years? Would anyone consider using this or any package from them?

kodt• 4 years ago

Yes they improved considerably from the past but old habits are hard to break.

account-5• 4 years ago

As a beginner, with no history, w3schools is way better than MDN.

kube-system• 4 years ago

MDN has really good beginners guides, if you go to their tutorial section and not the detailed documentation.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...

lelandfe2• 4 years ago

As someone who helps beginners learn CSS regularly at my job, my biggest qualm with MDN is that they tend to leave out the why.

Check out this page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/margin-bloc...

The `margin-block` CSS shorthand property defines the logical block start and end margins of an element, which maps to physical margins depending on the element's writing mode, directionality, and text orientation.

Whew, that's a lot.

Setting aside how inside baseball the terms "logical block" and "physical margin" are, this description fails to tell the reader why they would want to use this property. Why use this, instead of `margin`? It's nowhere on the page. Typically, that reasoning lays buried in the distant and forbidden "Guides" section (which MDN's search doesn't index).

To find our reasoning, you must go to Guides, under CSS expand "CSS building blocks," then finally click "Handling different text directions": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_...

“But look, you found the explanation for `margin-block`, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'”

synergy20• 4 years ago

agreed, somehow w3schools just made stuff really easy to learn, easy to navigate, and easy to refer.

I only need MDN when I want to read stuff 'deep', but 98% of the time I don't need that depth.

MDN is also hard to navigate, it works like a thick dictionary to me, it will be needed, but only rarely.

duxup2• 4 years ago

They’re handy for beginners.

MDN is a bit technical at times and doesn’t always have detailed examples a beginner might hope for.

Izkata• 4 years ago

Eh. I'm the same as GP, because back before learned that behavior, w3schools had plenty of straight up wrong information. So their question still stands: have they gotten better?

wnevets• 4 years ago

Has w3schools gotten any better over the years?

Their website has, no idea about the company itself tho.

doytch• 4 years ago

Ha, same. Though I've been using Kagi Search for a few months now and blocked W3Schools from my search results so I never make this mistake anymore.

lxe• 4 years ago

W3schools has completely redeemed itself at this point. The content is much much better than it was 10 years ago.

laundermaf3• 4 years ago

Not. As shown in many examples in this thread.

MatthiasPortzel• 4 years ago

I just pulled up the page for String.match, which is a weird function because it returns an array that has named properties on it. W3Schools doesn't mention that. It just says it "method returns an array with the matches." It also doesn't mention the behavior without the global flag. I also noticed a misspelling ("Differense").

=> https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_match.asp

=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Comparing these two pages, only the second one is competent at describing what the function actually does. Neither is perfect. The MDN doesn't do a great job of communicating all the information, but at least all of the information is there.

Waterluvian3• 4 years ago

Tangent: why is .match on Symbol? I read through string.match and looked at Symbol and I don’t understand why all these helpful functions exist on Symbol.

djbusby• 4 years ago

Can't we also issue PR against MDN?

Waterluvian3• 4 years ago

I use a plug-in to hide w3schools from results. MDN is amazing.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

I do have a deep-seated fear of being seen as less competent if someone saw it up on my screen.

irrational• 4 years ago

I would use the website. I don’t know anything about the library.

W3schools has gotten a lot better I’ve the past 5 years or so. I use it for quick lookups and only go to mdn when I’m trying to learn something new.

remram• 4 years ago

I wrote a search-result filter extension (actually TamperMonkey script) just for w3schools, many years ago! Then I added all those auto-generated comparison sites: stackshare, wikidiff, etc.

It's satisfying to see that my dislike is not some unfounded personal quirk!

jamesfinlayson• 4 years ago

I always use it for SQL syntax - no other site seems to give basic details about the syntax for different constructs.

hamboga• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert, but W3 schools uses <br> in their examples which is a bad way of teaching since my understanding is that there is never a good reason to use a <br> especially not to format a page, which is a habit I had to drop because I learned it from w3.

jakelazaroff2• 4 years ago

What’s wrong with <br>? It’s a perfectly semantic way to insert a line break. I use it often when I’m trying to get a block of text to look good at multiple breakpoints.

RockRobotRock• 4 years ago

W3schools sucks but still holds a place in my heart from my youth

lelanthran2• 4 years ago

Has w3schools gotten any better over the years? Would anyone consider using this or any package from them?

Yeah. I prefer it to MDN sometimes because they usually have a "try it yourself" that actually works very well.

Doesn't matter how much better the MDN doc might be, I often just want to try it myself.

iaml• 4 years ago

MDN also has a “try it” widget [0], works well enough for my purposes.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Ayesh2• 4 years ago

I can only judge them based on CSS and PHP content because those are the things I can even properly compare. W3schools continue to be a very low quality resource, incomplete and incoherent on most aspects.

There is a "try it yourself" that I sometimes use, merely because it's quick to whip something up, and much more faster than codepen.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

I would say they haven't changed much over the years, but I always quite liked them for just getting answers to simple things fast.

MDN is of course fantastic, but generally requires more reading/scrolling and is therefore slower for simple things like what's the markup for a button or select drop down thing look like again.

As for the w3.css style sheet, it's quite good for sprucing up small internal web apps.

rchaud5• 4 years ago

You nailed it about the appeal of W3: It's quick to get to the point.

I can read the first para and figure out what I'll be learning. The code examples are interactive and visual, and help enormously.

MDN reads like a technical reference. Wordpress documentation is similarly structured, but it has a comments section with a lot of sample code for different use cases, which helps me figure out whether the function I'm looking at will help accomplish what I am trying to do.

_the_inflator• 4 years ago

This here is for you then: https://www.w3fools.com/ ;)

w3schools got way better, but back then w3fools had its reason.

benknight87• 4 years ago

I did this so much that I got into the habit of putting "mdn" before any search query. Now I do it without even thinking about it.

reidrac• 4 years ago

In DDG you can just !mdn your search.

anonymous3442• 4 years ago

This. That is just awful site. Like created just to make you go crazy

tiborsaas• 4 years ago

No. The issue is that it's sometimes OK, sometimes good and sometimes hilariously bad. I don't want to play russian roulette with docs so I installed W3School blocker extension to weed out the problem at the root :)

theandrewbailey• 4 years ago

Use a better search engine that uses bangs like DuckDuckGo or Brave.

!mdn search term

brings you directly to MDN's search result page for search term.

rchaud5• 4 years ago

Tried learning HTML/CSS through that site in 2006. Terrible experience, so I continued to use Dreamweaver for personal projects.

Tried learning again in 2014, after a career change: Excellent experience, so good that I go there first.

I simply did not grok responsive design until I read their article about floats and media queries. I was trying to get admitted into a bootcamp at the time, and my assignment was to recreate a landing page from a PNG image, without using Bootstrap or any other grid framework.

Most official sources of technical documentation online are written by and for developers, and assume a lot of prior knowledge. I never understood a lick of the official jQuery documentation either, until I went through W3schools section on it, and then later Jon Duckett's beautifully visual dead-tree book on JS and jQuery.

err4nt• 4 years ago

They have some good resources for obscure technologies, like XPath, but for the big ones like HTML/CSS/JS there's both the danger that they're out of date and not showing you what's new, while also possibly showing you old hacks and workarounds that are against modern best practice.

MDN is a better choice for (almost) anything MDN has content for.

rchaud5• 4 years ago

How much of the core of HTML/CSS/JS has been deprecated?

Somebody going to W3schools probably isn't looking for the latest and greatest. The person who is looking for that would already have a good grasp of the fundamentals, and would have graduated to looking elsewhere, like StackOverflow or Caniuse.com.

dpcan3• 4 years ago

You’re missing out.

It’s probably the best and easiest to use css/js/html reference site anywhere.

I can’t gauge how it’s changed but I find it’s to-the-point and example driven format is perfect for the way I learn.

rchaud5• 4 years ago

They definitely updated the content of the site. But they left the look (color scheme, etc) largely unchanged from the 2000s, so opening the site probably reminds some people of the bad old days.

version_five• 4 years ago

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)

nullgeo• 4 years ago

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/

laundermaf3• 4 years ago

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.

thecoppinger• 4 years ago

That’s my experience and perception, too.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

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?

philipwhiuk2• 4 years ago

It's deliberate on the part of W3schools.

jcuenod• 4 years ago

And one of the many criticisms.

berjin• 4 years ago

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!

sanroot99• 4 years ago

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

lgessler• 4 years ago

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.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

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.

justusw• 4 years ago

    W3.CSS is free to use. No license is necessary.

Does that not constitute a license?

phire• 4 years ago

A very minimal one.

Decent chance it will stand up in court, but it's not going to make your legal department very happy.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

This might be it?

https://github.com/JaniRefsnes/w3css/blob/master/LICENSE

Based on the github account being similar to the names in https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/4/w3.css, it is likely to be the origin.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32831880, beat me to it by a few seconds!

jaimex2• 4 years ago

Yeah, but I would never work at a place with a legal department.

I like getting things done.

kyle-rb• 4 years ago

It sounds like whoever wrote that page doesn't know much about software licensing. Doesn't make me confident that w3schools has improved as much as people say it has.

However, it does seem to be MIT-licensed. Linked from the downloads page:

https://github.com/JaniRefsnes/w3css/blob/master/LICENSE

XorNot• 4 years ago

Would've helped if there any sort of license spec in the file header. All it's got is "/* W3.CSS 4.15 December 2020 by Jan Egil and Borge Refsnes */"

hamandcheese• 4 years ago

Being a bit more charitable, it could be that they are explaining things in a way that likely makes sense to someone just getting started. For many, “license” is a synonym for a software unlock code, not a legal contract.

shepherdjerred• 4 years ago

They probably meant that you don’t need to pay for a license, not that there is no legal license

troymc• 4 years ago

It constitutes evidence that the people behind W3.CSS don't fully understand copyright or licensing.

codazoda• 4 years ago

“No license is necessary.” What does that even mean? Sounds like w3.css is copyrighted with no license granting me the privilege of using it.

Edit: Looks like the GitHub repo does have a license and it’s a proper MIT license.

https://github.com/JaniRefsnes/w3css

jamesrr39• 4 years ago

I think here it means you don't need to buy a license or sign up to any terms and conditions, which would be in line with the MIT license in the github repository.

iambateman• 4 years ago

(This was a framework released in 2017.)

bornfreddy• 4 years ago

(This is a framework which was released in 2017.)

endless1234• 4 years ago

Yeah, and last commit to github was in 2018, last update to the hosted CSS file in 2020. Not quite sure why it's posted to HN now?

TobyTheDog123• 4 years ago

Even besides the licensing questions and IE comments, this just.... doesn't look good, I'm sorry.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were objectively incorrect design decisions here.

The final straw was when I visited the "Cards" component - my God.

Comparing this to Bootstrap? It's Bootstrap by a landslide.

j0hnyl• 4 years ago

I'm not a frontend person and I'm attracted to simplicity. I can certainly believe this is not good, but do you know if there are good minimal alternatives like this? Bootstrap seems a bit complex for basic stuff.

stackbutterflow• 4 years ago

Try Tailwind.

rodorgas• 4 years ago

Bulma is smaller. But I feel CSS frameworks are not much flexible, which may explain their decay. Also, frontend modern tooling helps you build your own components with minimal CSS helpers, like Tailwind.

christoph• 4 years ago

w3-circle made me chuckle.

https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_images.asp

selcuka• 4 years ago

It is a circle, from a certain point of view.

philipwhiuk2• 4 years ago

w3-center

Can we all please appreciate how stupid this CSS is. This literally removes the whole point of CSS classes.

tuukkah• 4 years ago

It's debatable which style is best and it also depends on the contex . Tailwind has popularised this style to the extreme, see e.g. https://tailwindcss.com/docs/align-content

dpcan3• 4 years ago

And it’s okay for bootstrap to use p- or m- etc? Is it just because it’s w3?

conjuredbytes• 4 years ago

I think there's a lot of unnecessary aggro in here just for the fact that it's from W3Schools. Yeah, MDN is a better source of record but W3schools often lays things out in a way that's easier for beginners to digest. I started with W3Schools before moving to MDN. It served a purpose.

that_guy_iain2• 4 years ago

I've heard it's way better than it used to be. It used to be a completely terrible resource but that was like 10-years ago. It's obivously had time to improve over the years.

One of the bad things in tech is that reputations stick and people are too quick to bad mouth something because of what it was like 10-15 years ago.

mhaberl• 4 years ago

I don't know about that.

I occasionally used that site at least 20 years ago. It seems to me that it serves the same audience as it did back then. You can quickly find useful pieces of information when you need them.

I don't get where did the bad rep come from. Did they show inaccurate information at some point? I never noticed that.

What I did notice is that people are eager to compare them to MDN any time they are mentioned. Even the wikipedia page about them says "MDN Web Docs – similar website".

This is obviously my personal experience and I could have missed something.

tommica• 4 years ago

Nice of them to do this

memset• 4 years ago

Has anyone used this (is it me new or has it been around?) Would love to know your experiences!

okasaki• 4 years ago

I've used it a bunch and think it's really great. eg. https://camo.githubusercontent.com/ae63c1d0f7400487244599120...

I thought it looked good and it's very simple to use.

hit8run• 4 years ago

Good for minimal stuff that’s fire and forget. Their official GitHub Repo is not in sync with the latest release on their website. CSS classes often contain !important rules which makes it harder to customize. No use of css variables so good luck with darkmode. They don’t make use of flexbox or css grid. A

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

What the heck IS w3schools? i.e who is behind it, where did it come from, where is it going?

It's always there and seemingly always BEEN there, and it always comes up in my search results and indeed I often use it and the info seems pretty good.

But apart from that, how can something so well used basically fly under the radar?

dzink• 4 years ago

It's how I learned web development 20 something years ago. They have simple, clear, entry level tutorials on HTML, CSS, JS and a number of other languages that give you enough to become somewhat productive on the web, so you can be interested in deeper content. It's an institution.

vijayabhaskarj• 4 years ago

I downloaded the W3Schools offline dump zip archive, which was under 50mb IIRC, from a friend when I first started learning programming because I didn't have access to proper internet. That helped me a lot to learn to code.

mrcus• 4 years ago

Most people seem to think w3schools has some form of association with the W3C. It is actually run by a small family company, Refsnes Data AS, from Sandnes, a depressing city on the western coast of Norway.

wizofaus• 4 years ago

Perhaps what the world needs is more depressing cities then...

TrackerFF• 4 years ago

As one comment under said, it's a small Norwegian family company (5 employees) that's been around since at least 1998. And they've always focused on what they do.

From open Norwegian business data (https://www.proff.no/selskap/refsnes-data-as/sandnes/it-kons...), it seems like they have a yearly revenue around $4.5M USD. From the annual salary expenses, those five employees either make bank - or they hire a lot of consultants from overseas.

So I guess it's a good example of first-mover advantage.

laundermaf3• 4 years ago

Outdated junk from a junk website. Stop upvoting this. The domain should probably be blocked from HN like tabloids are.

reportgunner• 4 years ago

If we block w3schools please block reddit too.

skilled2• 4 years ago

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.

Ayesh2• 4 years ago

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.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

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.

zichy• 4 years ago

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

I don't believe that would work out.

skilled2• 4 years ago

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.

Tao33002• 4 years ago

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.

napolux• 4 years ago

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 :)

dpcan3• 4 years ago

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.

enumjorge• 4 years ago

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.

klibertp3• 4 years ago

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.

rado• 4 years ago

Dropdowns unusable by keyboard, modal doesn't trap focus.

chillfox5• 4 years ago

I used W3.css some time ago to make a basic website [1] for making it easier to find rules while running a pen and paper role playing game.

[1] https://www.cardflip.asia/

adeleine• 4 years ago

From my experience with Bootstrap I can tell you the only thing you really need is the grid part of it and there are so many lightweight "frameworks" that have just that and its only 250 lines of css in the example of simple grid: https://simplegrid.io/

Everything else, buttons, modals, sliders, chords are super simple anyway you can just make them yourself or use a way more featurerich separate slider or modal framework and still be on less junk code than with using bootstrap.

tl;dr if you know html and css, you no longer need a css framework for most cases.

petepete• 4 years ago

These days you don't even need a grid library. You can build an entire layout in a handful of lines of CSS with CSS Grid.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_La...

It's well supported and gracefully degrades (so long as your content is in the right order in the markup).

anonymous3442• 4 years ago

waste of my 10 minutes just to find out it's old and not updated in 4 years. No thanks.

W3.css – A minimal alternative to Bootstrap

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