Lay off W3Schools

http://www.sagegerard.com/index.php?cID=152

by qubot • 14 years ago

85 98 14 years ago

ekm2• 14 years ago

The first time i wanted to learn HTML and CSS,i happened to come across the W3fools page.So i followed their advice and their recommended resources.What do i get?Tons and tons of STORIES about secure code,best practices,patchy examples,and some sections clearly marked "This notes are out of date".Man,i have barely learned to switch on a computer.What are you talking about??

polemic2• 14 years ago

> "...Some folks have started voicing hostile opinions..."

A little late to the game, there.

This post ignores two important points:

1. There are a lot of much better sites out there (linked to from W3Fools, even). Selectively highlighting a single post is misleading.

2. W3Fools is not so much for the benefit of W3Schools, but for people who link to W3Schools as reference in blog posts, SO answers, etc. There are lots of great reference sites (MDN!) that provide much better material, but circumstances have given W3Schools a lot of GoogleFu. That needs to change.

qubot29• 14 years ago

#1: Where is one post highlighted? The article (lazily) acknowledges other competition, and you even quoted said acknowledgement.

#2: Yes, this point is ignored because it was not really the focus. The benefit you speak of can be realized without statements like "W3SCHOOLS IS TROUBLE" in big scary letters on W3Fool's homepage. The attitudes of the people involved and the clarity of their content are the focus of the article.

polemic2• 14 years ago

#1: Paragraph 3 - "...sometimes even dead silence..."

#2: OP misses the point of why there is so much hostility. If W3Schools was on page 3 for (chosen utterly at random)"getElementById" on Google, no one would care. Predictably, however, it's number 1. That's pretty dire - I would hope that the top results for common questions would be quality resources. Which W3Schools is not. There is a greater good here, which is not served by continuing to promote W3Schools the top developer resource.

sachingulaya2• 14 years ago

Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. It's jargon loaded and filled with a bunch of information that means nothing to beginners.

Let's look the page for explaining 'div': http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp

"The <div> tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document.

The <div> tag is used to group block-elements to format them with styles."

Oh, I get it. Its for grouping block-elements(??) to format them with styles(??).

The above is followed by this fantastic tip: "Tip: The <div> element is very often used together with CSS, to layout a web page."

Looking at their "examples" its an in-browser html editor with un-annotated code that makes a table suitable for the web circa 1995.

Then it trails off in to sparse definitions of the attributes for the div tag with an excessive amount of discussion about web standards compatibility.

Normally I wouldn't gripe about an awful tutorial site but w3schools consistently ranks high in google queries for questions about html tags. Personally I've never left w3schools with an answer to the question that led me there. That signals to me that it is indeed a failure.

qubot29• 14 years ago

> "Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners."

My experience says the opposite. Sorry.

sachingulaya2• 14 years ago

There's nothing to be 'sorry' about.

I made websites sporadically from '97-'03 and then started again in Dec '11. My criticism of w3schools is from my personal experience with the site over the last year.

I was surprised when I found out that w3schools actually intends to teach people html/css. Until recently, I thought it was universally acknowledged that they're a content farm.

wallawe• 14 years ago

Agreed. As someone who just began coding less than a year ago, I can honestly say that it has rarely if ever helped me. I've found other free sites like Chris Coyer's "css-tricks" to be far more beneficial. That said, it is a free service and I can appreciate that, but it's time for some improvements.

bsphil• 14 years ago

From my personal experience when I was new to html and css, I was constantly referencing w3schools to look up things. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I was happy using it.

tkahn6• 14 years ago

> Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners.

I too had the exact opposite experience. I found the HTML, CSS, and Javascript tutorials extremely intuitive and well-presented when I was in 7th grade. I ate them up.

andrewfelix4• 14 years ago

Agreed. I don't depend on it any more, but w3schools helped me make the transition from WYSIWG web site building to hand coding.

colmvp• 14 years ago

Same here. Vastly more readable for a novice (like myself at the time) than W3C.

luriel• 14 years ago

It might be approachable, but that doesn't make it any less horrible.

Yes, some people find it useful when they don't know better, but I suspect those people at that point they would have found almost any tutorial useful.

kurokonaa• 14 years ago

I completely agree. Back in the early 2000s, I remember trying to learn HTML and CSS from them and understanding very little about a whole lot. I would say that the experience effectively put me off webdev until just recently.

Blara• 14 years ago

If you are a beginner maybe you shouldn't start by reading about the <div> element... Just like when you start programming you shouldn't start with recursion. It does help to start at the beginning and work your way through to <div>. I already had basic HTML/CSS knowledge when I found the site so not sure how it is to beginners, but I found your example to be a bit unfair.

darkestkhan• 14 years ago

What's wrong in starting programming with recursion? It is more intuitive since you learn about it in school...

maigret4• 14 years ago

Yes, a random page in w3schools is for developers, not for beginners. And yes, they do have tutorials where beginners should begin with. After the tutorial, they indeed know what a block element and a style is.

Google downgraded w3schools in search. It used to be constently the first result. Now it is rather 5th or 6th.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

> W3Schools has already announced that it's content should be used at the user's risk, which means they waive all responsibility for inexperienced users. It is not their job to babysit developers, since it is the developer's job to research other sources and improve his understanding through rigorous practice and peer feedback.

That's awful advice for beginners, who have no idea why some things are good and others are dumb.

Some people will validate their pages. Some of those people will know what the errors mean, but decide that it's okay to have those errors. Other people will get a bunch of errors, and not really understand what's going on, and will just publish anyway because "it works in the browsers I tested on".

qubot29• 14 years ago

> "That's awful advice for beginners"

It's not bad advice to suggest that developers be stupid if they are the type to learn from their mistakes. If they are not the type to learn from their mistakes, why are we worried about them?

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Being given correct information but making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes in your efforts to recreate the good advice, is a useful learning technique.

Being given incorrect information, and making mistakes, and not knowing you've made mistakes, is not a useful learning technique.

And while these people are making mistakes and learning from them their customers are suffering buggy code and everything that goes with that - data loss and insecurity at the extreme end and unexpected behaviour at the mild end.

executive2• 14 years ago

nice url structure you got there

qubot29• 14 years ago

http://www.sagegerard.com/blog/lay-off-w3schools/ works. Edit mode in Concrete5 does not use pretty links.

executive2• 14 years ago

considering you use this mess I'm not suprised you support w3schools: https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/blob/master/web/concr...

esolyt• 14 years ago

To be fair, W3Schools is simpler, cleaner and more organized than the alternatives suggested by W3Fool. It is still the fastest way to start learning about a web technology. But perhaps it would be best if they wikify it.

qubot29• 14 years ago

Maybe, but I would be concerned about a future where W3School's increase in accuracy hurts it's clarity.

ctrlfrk3• 14 years ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

qubot29• 14 years ago

That can be used against anything.

andrewfelix4• 14 years ago

Except w3school is a road to heaven paved with bad instructions. None the less it is a road, and it's approachable.

ctrlfrk3• 14 years ago

Oh no, if you follow the instructions on that site you're going straight to code hell. Yes it is very approachable and enticing, but it's wrong.

lbcadden3• 14 years ago

domain: w3fools.com created: 08-Jan-2011

http://whois.domaintools.com/w3fools.com

qubot29• 14 years ago

The age of what is being talked about does not determine the relevance of the conversation and what it entails.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

> It is unrealistic to expect beginners to learn what good code is before what code is in the first place. Aspiring programmers do not yet understand the nuances of their trade, and often overlook security concerns and the importance of formal documentation.

That's no excuse for ignoring even the basics. Some of the w3schools tutorials are like starting a teenager's first driving lesson with "run down as many pedestrians as you want, we'll teach you how to not drive on sidewalks later".

qubot29• 14 years ago

No, they're not. Quit exaggerating and let beginners be beginners.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

C'mon. Their "PHP MySQL Insert Into" tutorial (http://w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_insert.asp) uses direct $_POST data with no escaping. No mention of security is made in the entire "PHP Database" section.

These tutorials need a massive red flashing warning saying "we've left critical stuff out, you will get your site defaced if you code like this".

Newbies don't need to be expected to know good code. That's no excuse for presenting actively dangerous examples to them with no warning.

mdm_• 14 years ago

Not sure if you're serious or just trolling (you seem to be posting snippy responses to everyone's comments here), but there's a big difference between something like O'Reilly's Missing Manual or Head First series and w3schools. As demonstrated on the w3fools site, some of the information on w3schools is inaccurate or just plain wrong. The O'Reilly books have a much higher degree of accuracy yet remain approachable, beginner-level texts.

qubot29• 14 years ago

> "you seem to be posting snippy responses to everyone's comments here"

Sorry about that. It is not my intention to be rude or troll, but I've got a lot of discussions to manage. I went ahead and edited out some needlessly harsh bits here and there, but I'm not touching ones where I am just reciprocating the same attitude as the parent post.

I'll watch myself more carefully, so thanks for the reminder.

> "The O'Reilly books have a much higher degree of accuracy yet remain approachable, beginner-level texts."

Yes, but they still promote outdated and insecure approaches. As a beginner, I actually got yelled at for using an image map for obvious reasons. The edition of the book I used did not discourage them, but I still swear it was a nicely written text.

As for inaccuracies... W3Schools has been addressing them if the cited sources were reliable.

shazow2• 14 years ago

w3schools is not the best resource, but 90% of the time, when it shows up as the top result on Google, it tells me exactly what I want to know.

Some common examples:

- What values does CSS attribute white-space take? #1 result on Google for "css white-space" is http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_white-space.asp which has exactly what I need to know.

- What members does the Array object in JavaScript have? For the query "javascript array", the first result is an overview of what an Array is, but the second result is the object reference which is exactly what I need.

When learning, looking things up is one of the most common actions. Whenever w3schools comes up, it doesn't necessarily make me smile but it's reliable^Wconsistent so I know what to expect. It maintains a lot of utility, unlike good ol' experts-exchange.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

So? The 2nd result (MDN) does the same, looks better, and almost never contains inaccuracies or bad practices.

> it's reliable

That's the whole point of w3fools: w3s is not reliable.

qubot29• 14 years ago

> "That's the point of w3fools: w3s is not reliable..."

This unreliable (albeit crystal-clear) source did not stop me from scoring a good portfolio and happy clients (http://linkd.in/ON5eHL).

shazow2• 14 years ago

It's consistent. The layout of the site is simple and predictable. It's easy to figure out where to find what you're looking for and what to expect.

> So? The 2nd result (MDN) does the same, looks better, and almost never contains gross errors/bad practices.

So indeed. I have nothing against MDN--it's great. If it was the first result, I'd click on it instead.

kibibyte• 14 years ago

I highly recommend http://dochub.io/ over w3schools. Not only does it source MDN, which is much more accurate, but it allows you to instantly search for whatever CSS property or JS function/object you're looking for. (The only thing that I find disadvantageous is that you have to know the name of what you're looking for)

qubot29• 14 years ago

Oo! I like the system, but beginners wouldn't know what to do there. By that I mean, they would not learn much there without prior knowledge.

jasonhanley2• 14 years ago

Is there a similar site that is less Firefox-specific?

corkill• 14 years ago

I have learnt/used as reference way more from w3schools than I ever will from the people who created w3fools.

So kudos to them for criticizing the crap out of the site? (I do also see what they are doing as valuable, but I'd agree it's needlessly hostile).

I of course didn't learn exclusively from w3chools (I doubt anyone does), it's just a resource. Not perfect, but it's useful.

gdg92989• 14 years ago

What is it 2008?

qubot29• 14 years ago

The age of what is being talked about does not determine the relevance of the conversation and what it entails.

jpalomaki• 14 years ago

From the w3fools I learned the valuable trick that if you add "mdn" to your Google search you are likely to get a link pointing to Mozilla Developer Network.

briandear• 14 years ago

W3 is killing it in the SEO department though. It'd be nice to buy those guys and use that google-juice for the forces of good.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

I suspect that sources like W3Schools, the O'Reilly Missing Manual series and DirectXTutorial.com leave out good practices to avoid overwhelming the reader.

This idea is sometimes called Wittgenstein's ladder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children - "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it."

qubot29• 14 years ago

I agree with everything but the last bit. If you throw away the ladder, doesn't that represent forgetting the information that actually helped you?

sirclueless• 14 years ago

No, you're still on top of the mountain, you just no longer need the rungs.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

I think it might be interpreted as "throwing away" the ladder-based technique, not forgetting about it.

So, for example, I might learn to build a Rails app using the scaffolding system, but once I know Rails well, I wouldn't.

maigret4• 14 years ago

It helps. Let's take the example of numbers. You begin learning as a child with 1, 2, 3... Everything is an integer and begins with one. Rapidly, you learn the notion of 0. And then at school, at some point, come the negative numbers. You have to "throw the ladder" that numbers are integer and begin with 1. You still know how to count, indeed in a more complex way.

Let's say you begin with markup, and just put the style as a tag to begin with. At some point, you know what a style does, but you have to throw the ladder that it has to be inside the markup, and externalize it to .css file.

Learning is a progressive experience.

sandollars• 14 years ago

Step 1: Log into Google.com

Step 2: Block w3schools at http://www.google.com/reviews/t

> Sites will be blocked only for you, but Google may use everyone's blocking information to improve the ranking of search results overall.

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

That blocking no longer works for me.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Yeah, how dare we as developers criticise a website disseminating wrong information like W3Schools. It's not their fault they get tonnes of Google traffic and have made no effort whatsoever to bring their site inline with other equally great resources.

The first Google result for the query, "div tag" is a W3Schools page. The page then cringefully displays a sample piece of code with an inline style colour attribute that probably would have been acceptable in 2002. Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a purpose, but I've often found myself on a W3Schools reference page and not leaving a single useful piece of information.

It feels like W3Schools hasn't changed since it launched. I'm guessing the software company that runs it has better things to do and doesn't really care whether or not they're miseducating people.

And by the way, I think the author is about 7 years too late on the W3Schools hate train, the article reads like hating W3Schools is a new thing.

qubot29• 14 years ago

> "I think the author is about 7 years too late..."

If Hacker News participants ran the world no one would care about history. We can discuss things that happened in the past. It sure as hell sparked discussion here.

> "Don't get me wrong, as a developer I think W3Schools can serve a purpose..."

And it does. It's easy to understand, which is not something you find often in sites trying to teach something. As I said elsewhere, good code makes crappy tutorials since it introduces more concepts that can confuse and overwhelm a inexperienced reader.

jasonhanley2• 14 years ago

I agree. I've been developing web stuff since '98 or so, and w3schools is quick, easy, and I've never run into an accuracy problem that affected a real, production site. Most are academic.

Sure, there's better sites out there, but sometimes you just have to trust the Google.

If the site shows up #1 for 90% of web stuff you're looking for, then others obviously found it useful too.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

W3Schools is not perfect but it is the best HTML/CSS reference that I've seen. The W3Fools effort is sort of well-intentioned but overly disrespectful. The supposed alternatives linked from W3Fools are hideous.

W3Fools energy would be _MUCH_ better spent on developing an alternative.

qubot29• 14 years ago

Yes! Thank you.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

We have MDN, dochub, sitepoint, etc, they all have up-to-date, correct content. We don't need another one. What's hideous about them?

maigret4• 14 years ago

MDN: Too Mozilla centric. I certainly hate devs who make Firefox-only pages more than ones who look up on w3schools. And I've met a few of them ;)

dochub: Where are the tutorials?

Sitepoint: The structure is messy. It looks like a blog, but a historical structure is awful for learning. I want topic categories. Also lots of things I don't care about - books, courses - I just want references and tutorials! MDN is better from this side.

I'm not convinced. You're not going to kill w3schools if you don't understand why so many folks go to that site.

Personally I didn't know dochub, and might probably get back soon on this site. It's clean, and the information is useful, but only when you already understand well what you're doing. It's not for learning the Web concepts. Also, it misses direct mention of browser support for every feature.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

OK, MDN is good. So I just have to add "mdn" to my Google searches. But the others really are awful.

ch0wn• 14 years ago

I think the important point is, that there ARE better alternatives out there. There's just no point in defending a mediocre and potentially harmful[0] learning platform. There's no need for hostility, just move on.

[0]http://en.w3schools.com/php/php_ajax_database.asp

wilhil• 14 years ago

"Some folks have started voicing"... How old is the article!?

Lay off W3Schools

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