
W3Fools Takes on W3Schools - stretchwithme
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/w3fools-takes-on-w3schools.php
======
kellishaver
I can't help but feel that all of that time and effort they spent criticizing
and nitpicking could have been spent building something better. If this is
something they really feel passionately about, rather than just a way to amuse
themselves with angry rants, then all that energy could have been put to so
much better use.

I guess it's easier to hate and claim to be taking the high ground than it is
to actually put forth an effort to make the state of things better-which says
more about them than it does W3Schools, and probably says a lot about human
nature in general, really.

W3Schools is not without its many and varied problems, both in content and, as
others have said, its own code base, but so is nearly every other tutorial or
web programming site on the internet that's more than, say, a year old. The
'net is litered with old content that often can be difficult for new
developers to filter out and know what's good and what's not. Just look at the
volume of old, horrible PHP tutorials floating around, or even old Rails code.
The main difference is that a lot of people will see W3Schools and assume it
is associated with the W3, so they might take it as being a more reliable
source.

I'm not sure how actively W3Schools is updated, but if they have a staff
maintaining it and actively develop and write content for the site and they're
not replacing the old with the new, then yes, that's just lazy and they
_should_ be doing better, but tutorial sites containing old, bad code and
coding practices is certainly nothing unique to W3Schools.

~~~
slexaxton
I'm really confused by the notion of the "In the time this article took, they
could have built a better one" arguments.

I don't know how long you think it took (
<https://github.com/paulirish/w3fools> ) but it took a couple of hours of time
from a few people over about a week.

I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of
information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a
lot longer than a week.

And just because the creators didn't build a clone of w3schools, doesn't mean
they aren't contributing useful information back to the various communities
affected by the nonsense published at w3schools. Every single one of them are
writing blog posts and submitting to open source projects, hosting podcasts,
helping on IRC channels and forums, and building helpful websites to learn
exactly the same stuff found on w3schools, except with valid information.

The creators of w3fools have no issue with the other resources that are
available that they suggested as alternatives. For more specific beginner
data, there are numerous walkthroughs and helpful answers littered across the
internet with the correct information in them. Creating yet another site that
puts together tutorials isn't what is needed. They want the beginners to be
able to have a fair chance at good knowledge. Creating a site to slowly gain
google juice over the next two years does nothing to help people today. Until
w3schools stops showing up first for every "___ Tutorial" search in existence,
the job of making it a notoriously questionable resource will do way more good
than building a shadow site would do. If at least you are somewhat aware that
you should fact check the things that you learn there.

I find it a little bit troublesome that the group that follows 'hacker' news
is so willingly supportive of blatant technical misinformation. You can
nitpick about some of the things that are brought up, but as a whole, it's
ridiculous that the number one resource for technical information is so wildly
out of touch with reality. You can question the method that this was brought
up, but you should still have the desire to see good information in the wild.

And finally, yes, there are other out of date websites that have tutorials on
them, but they don't show up first in google, and they don't sell
certifications based on their misinformation to unknowing people who don't
realize that the certifications mean absolutely nothing (and are potentially
detrimental). Get mad at whoever you want, but objectively speaking, the site
is a disservice to the community, regardless of it's ease. Getting bad
information is _always_ easy.

~~~
Isofarro
Rather than creating a website to kvetch about the contents of one domain, I
suggest you and your collaborators' time is better spent curating a set of
resources that teach what you consider valid information that can be used by
people wanting to get started in web development (it would also be far more
beneficial to the web development community).

That one collaboratively edited directory of peer-reviewed resources would
create a one-stop-shop for people looking for the best material on a specific
topic or niche. By web developers for web developers.

Put those collection of related resources on MDC if you must (you say it's
editable by anyone, so all your collaborators can participate at will, and
have an aged and already authority-status starting point right on your
doorstep).

One of the hardest things is to find resources for the beginner that teaches
them high quality web development from scratch. Create a map for others and
lead the way.

That I feel is a far more constructive approach than this angst-ridden site
you've spawned. And it has a more immediate benefit of linking to existing and
already indexed material on the web, and add/aggregate more authority.

A link from the zeldmans, heilmanns, sharps & blawsons and malarkey's of the
web development community, and the reach they all have to a multitude of web
developers can quickly give a high-quality curated resource a starting boost
towards ranking the right material higher.

Since if all your collaborators are already heavily involved in creating web
materials covering the subjects W3schools teaches, then there's already a set
of authoritative sites existing. Those can all point to your master curation
site, and consequently pass on existing google juice to those materials that
exist and are fit for purpose.

Taking off W3schools from Google only promotes result number 2 up to the first
place - is that really an improvement?

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aw3c2
_authors did not contact W3Schools ahead of time._

I've seen a lot of aggression against w3schools but this is worse. An angry
rant website. So much nitpicking. So much tantrums. They seem not to be
interested in making w3schools better but want to destroy them.

From w3fools:

 _The markup of the W3Schools site itself is awful and does not conform to
best practices: table in table in table in table, with lots of inline styles._

Completely irrelevant. Don't shoot the messenger.

I use what my search engine gives me. w3schools is usually on top. I learned a
lot from w3schools and sometimes even directly go to it for reference.

edit: Apparently there was a previous discussion here, on a draft version.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082089>

~~~
BonsaiDen
Well there's a reason why everything that mentions w3schools gets down voted
into oblivion over at Stackoverflow.

The site is horrible. Period.

> Completely irrelevant. Don't shoot the messenger.

Aha. Well, if they can't even get their own site right, why should I listen to
them in the first place?

Sorry, but that's like hiring a Web Design whose own Web Site consists of
nothing more than yellow 20px Comic Sans text on a blue background that uses a
million blink tags.

~~~
qw
> The site is horrible. Period.

They don't claim to be web designers. The web site is easy to use and a great
resource for beginners. Their XPath tutorial was much better than other
tutorials when I needed to get a quick start a couple of years ago.

The table discussion is irrelevant to the users. Most of them never look at
the source code and is interested in the actual tutorials. If table based
layout invalidates a site, you should stop using Google, HN and Stack
Overflow...

~~~
BonsaiDen
> The web site is easy to use and a great resource for beginners.

Yep a great resource, for wasting a ton of precious time in which they could
have learned how to do things __right __instead of using techniques from ca.
2000.

> ...interested in the actual tutorials.

Which are still the worst part of the site.

Example (just clicked on one of their JS tutorials):

> JavaScript statements can be grouped together in blocks. > Blocks start with
> a left curly bracket {, and ends with a right curly bracket }. > The purpose
> of a block is to make the sequence of statements execute together.

Pure BS. JavaScript has no block scope. {} aren't needed for "executing stuff
together".

Another thing they tell people is that "var foo = 2;" and "foo = 2;", are
equal, more BS.

> If table based layout invalidates a site...

There is a difference in using a table layout because it's a good choice
(Google doesn't validate in any way, the just want to cut down traffic, which
makes sense for them) and just using it because, well... because one has no
better idea.

~~~
sid0
As an aside, ES Harmony will have block-scoped bindings.

<http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let>

------
smackay
None of the altenatives listed by W3Fools appear to counter the overwhelming
advantage of W3Schools in that you can quickly look up information on a given
html attribute or css selector. The site is essentially one big cheat-sheet.

Unless W3Fools puts up a credible alternative (the open wiki demand is
unlikely to be entertained for an instant) then the war would seem to over
just as the first shots are being fired.

~~~
aapl
What's wrong with Mozilla Developer Network HTML and CSS references?

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element>
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference>

Granted, the HTML reference doesn't have by attribute directory.

~~~
joelanman
Couple of clever things about W3schools learning experience that are missing
from Mozilla's site:

\- Working examples. W3Schools leads with them - Mozilla doesn't seem to have
any.

\- The 'try it yourself' feature. Nothing cements learning like playing around
with the concepts for yourself.

compare the img entry for both:

<http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp>

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img>

~~~
paulirish
Thanks very much for that feedback. I'm summarizing the discussion in order to
deliver some actionable feedback to the Mozilla team. :)

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jonconley
What a waste of time by w3fools. Why would you put the time and energy into
tearing down another site? If it is the quality of the content, then spend
that time creating quality content for another site.

You don't see facebook making a site showing why myspace sucks. You don't see
google or bing making a site showing how yahoo sucks. Create the quality
content and let your site speak for itself.

With tutorial sites like tryruby and railsforzombies (and HN just had a
javascript one also), there is definitely a higher standard of tutorial that
one could aim for. Just do it or shut up already.

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tybris
I started off my career using w3schools about a decade ago (which turned from
playing with (D)HTML to distributed systems engineering) and I still find
myself going there occasionally. It's a good reference. They deserve better.

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spacemanaki
"W3Schools.com is not affiliated with the W3C in any way."

This does seem to be a pretty common misconception. I've seen quite a few
beginners on StackOverflow, etc type of sites pointing at W3Schools as if they
were the last word for something.

"W3Schools" was a pretty clever choice of name I guess...

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acangiano
I'm not so certain which ones are the fools.

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akavlie
This, from the article:

"I linked to W3Schools' JavaScript tutorial in our 6 Free JavaScript E-Books
and Tutorials post. I never came across the tutorials from Google, Mozilla or
PromoteJS while doing my research for that post. I just checked, and although
W3Schools' JavaScript tutorial still comes up as the top search result for
"JavaScript Tutorial" none of the sites W3Fools lists were found in the first
10 pages of results for a search for "JavaScript Tutorial." This shows the
uphill battle other tutorial writers face when competing with W3Schools."

So the W3Schools tutorial is #1 on Google, while Mozilla's vastly superior
guide is buried. Right, that makes sense.

Exhibit A for Google's broken ranking algorithm.

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webuiarchitect
Wow! I always wanted to do something similar for this community and had also
started putting content together. But I understand, it is not a one-man job!
Bravo guys!!

~~~
webuiarchitect
I didn't mean criticizing w3schools - I meant, I always wished for a better,
refined and more practical oriented alternative.

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fourstar
They did a terrible job of explaining WHY the practices from w3 are wrong.

FAIL.

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jpr
What horrible website those W3Fools have.

