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W3schools.dev Redirects to Mozilla Developer Network
- fka 8y agovim.dev redirection is evil, w3schools.dev redirection is gift.
- sigzero 8y agoIs this supposed to mean something?
- pluma 8y agoProbably someone bought the domain as a joke or to lead young developers in the right direction.
- johnnyfaehell 8y agoOther than it being funny, no it means nothing.
- duxup 8y agoI know at one point w3schools.com was a bit out of date but they seemed to update it. As someone who has changed careers and moved into web development I found w3schools.com did a nice job of complementing MDN as if I was unfamiliar with the concept (or just forgot entirely) w3 was a good "layman's terms" stop just to start. And if I needed a more technical / granular detail, MDN. I really wouldn't want to use one without the other. Many years ago I took some C programming classes in college. It was in the early days of the internet and it was very much a "here's the book, a bit of lecture, now sit alone at your computer and do it". MDN can feel that way at times where it's example is ultra specific and while nothing is technically wrong.... it's like learning a language with a dictionary. w3schools.com fills that gap nicely. At the same time if I need the dictionary to figure out more precisely how something works and all my options, it's MDN all the way.
- pluma 8y agoPart of w3schools' bad reputation comes from intentionally failing to disavow itself from the W3C (w3.org) while providing commercial certifications. The W3C asked them to clarify this non-affiliation several times and it seems the only thing that ever came from it is one sentence on the About page. Seeing that many developers (including experienced professionals) thought the two entities were related, it seems obvious that they directly benefited from that confusion. Luckily this seems less relevant now that WHAT WG exists separately from W3C and ECMA/TC39 is more prominent.
- duxup 8y agoI didn't know that thanks. I wonder how many folks using w3schools.com really know who w3.org really is ;)
- hans_castorp 8y agoPart of w3fools bad reputation stems from the fact the site is (or at least was) full of errors - especially their SQL part.
- andyjohnson0 8y agoW3Schools has been turning-up in my web searches for probably as long as it has existed [1] and I can't remember it ever occurring to me that it was affiliated with the w3c. Maybe this really was a concern to w3c but I seriously doubt many other people were mislead. [1] Just checked. Twenty years!
- nacs 8y agoI've been doing web dev work for over a decade now and always thought there was an affiliation with their w3schools and W3C. Fortunately I've only used them as a quick reference and not for any kind certification as OP mentioned they also provide. TIL
- ben509 8y agoI never did because I had seen sketchy brands trying to mimic popular brands before, so I was primed to be skeptical. But it is pretty natural in how language works for people to see similar names and assume an association. And you can't reconsider an unconscious association, since it's unconcious.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Numberwang 8y agoTrashy and disgusting. I hope it's not Mozilla doing this.
- CydeWeys 8y agoObviously not.
- thatguyagain 8y agoDoes any of these redirections matter? Does anyone ever just spontaniously visit somedomain.dev anyway? You google w3school and go to the top result, right?
- duxup 8y agoWell now it's in all of our browser history so until we clear our history it's going to autocomplete .... dang it.
- nwhatt 8y agoI wish google would automatically put MDN at the top of search results. As it is I have to scroll through 4 or so other links before getting the MDN result.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoUse DuckDuckGo and !mdn, e.g.: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!mdn+regexp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!mdn+regexp
- SimeVidas 8y agoor just mdn.io/regexp
- amelius 8y agoAlso I wish I could just exclude any given site from my search results. Google insists on having my information so they can "serve me content tailored to my wishes". Well, Google ... drop the w3schools already!
- duxup 8y agoSadly it seems pretty clear that AI, algorithms, or just any custom content systems ... will be directed AT us now, not FOR us.
- kevingrahl 8y agoYou can easily do that. If you wanted to exclude example.com just add -example.com to your search query.
- syn0byte 8y agoJust add "site:-domain.com" to any given search query.
- XCabbage 8y agoYeah, but that approach is annoying and pointless. Typing that is no faster than scrolling past the w3schools results when they appear, so why would I do it? I Google loads of stuff each day. I want to drop w3schools from all my results, automatically.
- Gaelan 8y agoNote that w3schools.com does not.
- anoncake 8y agoI first thought that w3schools had closed shop or been bought by Mozilla. These new TLDs just cause confusion.
- debacle 8y agoI prefer w3schools. Their site is easier to search than MDN and I get the information I need more quickly. MDN is more valuable if I need to check browser support or figure out an edge case. People who have a hate hardon for w3schools are the kind of people who will judge you for the kind of dish soap you use. I'm certain w3schools will claim the domain in short order.
- hyperpape 8y agoMany years ago, when w3schools was truly terrible, a bunch of prominent developers created https://www.w3fools.com https://www.w3fools.com to promote MDN. Nowadays, that site reads Today, W3Schools has largely resolved these issues and addressed the majority of the undersigned developers' concerns. For many beginners, W3Schools has structured tutorials and playgrounds that offer a decent learning experience. Do keep in mind: a more complete education will certainly include MDN and other reputable resources.
- patrickaljord 8y agoI've always disagreed with this and hated the level of snobbism. w3schools was always better and still is better than MDN at what it is intended. w3school gives quick and simple answers to most basic web dev questions. MDN's examples are way more complex and are usually hidden under a wall of text, sure their documentation are more complete which is great if you're a student or need the whole spec. But if you're a dev trying to get something done, it's the best with stackoverflow now and github issues.
- hyperpape 8y agoI agree that MDN is not always at the right level of detail for a lot of questions, but the archived version of w3fools shows some truly awful errors. The w3schools content just didn't meet a minimal bar of accuracy back then.
- Yoric 8y agoSnobbism? I personally stopped visiting w3schools when I started finding more answers that were simply wrong than ones that were right. Glad to hear that it has improved since then, though.
- booleandilemma 8y agow3schools reminds me of Simple English Wikipedia. It provides fast, accessible answers. I know the type of person who doesn’t like w3schools. They’re usually full of themselves, and they think the first programming book a person should read is Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming.
- robin_reala 8y agoCan we be gracious on HN, and assume that people have good reasons for disliking a site?
- bastawhiz 8y agoIn my experience, w3schools provides mediocre documentation and bad code snippets. The things they suggest are not good practices, in many cases, and serve only the folks looking for some easy copypasta without needing to really understand what their code is doing. Rather than suggest using a framework (half of their snippets could be replaced with a single line of jQuery) they put bad or half-baked advice out into the world with no good explanation of what the code they're giving you is actually doing.
- onli 8y agoGosh, a framework? Their job is to show examples on how to use ~~web attributes~~basic web elements and pure Javascript. Which is btw exactly what MDN does as well on those function pages. jQuery has no place there and the modern web developer crowd (which I'm not a part of) even regards it as legacy, to be replaced with React etc. No, the focus on the real basics is exactly right.
- bastawhiz 8y agoBut they're rarely "the basics". Search for Ajax on w3schools and you'll be greeted with code samples for loading XML CD catalogs and replacing the contents of <div>s with HTML loaded without error handling. And of course, there's no explanations for any of it. It's never been "the basics," it's never been about quality, it's a content farm to pull in junior devs with outdated copypasta so they can show ads. Plain and simple. jQuery is not sexy or modern, but w3school's supposed tutorials are ancient, teach bad practices (find me an XHR example that doesn't use ready State), and work objectively less well than their framework (or modern JS) counterparts. For the market they're serving, they're leading to _worse_ software being built.
- onli 8y agoThat's not fair. The article you mention is https://www.w3schools.com/xml/ajax_applications.asp https://www.w3schools.com/xml/ajax_applications.asp, and it comes after a sound and basic introduction of the XMLHttpRequest element. > find me an XHR example that doesn't use ready State I absolutely see no problem with using readystate. > and work objectively less well than their framework (or modern JS) counterparts Come on, that's silly. What's called modern JS and what those super heavy framework use are in no way objectively better. To confront beginners with all their overhead (build tools for JS! Just crazy) is in no way helpful.
- thisisweirdok 8y agoAs much as I prefer MDN, W3Schools is fine now.
- timvisee 8y agohttps://vim.dev/ https://vim.dev/
- johnl1479 8y agoI hoped it wasn't true before I clicked, but it was
- dbdjfjrjvebd 8y agoI am confused. I expected an editor but the link goes to a promising looking OS? Can anyone recommend a good editor for this Emacs OS? Maybe someone has ported ViM?
- mercer 8y agoThat's just Evil!
- XCabbage 8y agoLots of people are commenting to say that W3Schools is now fine. I disagree. On the rare occasion that I end up interacting with them in some way, I find errors. My Stack Overflow post history contains three mentions of W3Schools, all of which involve W3Schools making an error: * https://stackoverflow.com/q/20610930/1709587 https://stackoverflow.com/q/20610930/1709587, about W3Schools stating falsely that it's necessary to explicitly add `type="submit"` to submit buttons in HTML to ensure cross-browser compatibility. * https://stackoverflow.com/a/52355253/1709587 https://stackoverflow.com/a/52355253/1709587, in which W3Schools makes false claims about the `colspan` attribute - both about what the specs say about it, and about how browsers implement it. * https://stackoverflow.com/a/46866568/1709587 https://stackoverflow.com/a/46866568/1709587, where W3Schools suggests a JavaScript function to shuffle an array which both technically invokes undefined behaviour under the ECMAScript standard and which does not fairly shuffle arrays in practice in real browsers. None of these things are fixed. The fact that they tidied up the specific errors that the W3Fools team listed, in response to the biggest ever hostile PR campaign that W3Schools ever faced, does not mean that they are now a decent, error-free source. Far from it.
- tapland 8y agoI don't do web programming, but that sounds extremely minor compared to practices taught in a lot of books.
- johnmarcus 8y agodude,unless your a perfect person you are not allowed to help others. w3 schools should write a novel on each and every feature implemented in every single browser otherwise, they just worthless pieces of cow dung and no one should learn programming from them. /s i fucking hate pedantic dicks whom get nothing done (being op, not you)
- XCabbage 8y agoThree observations: 1. These problems caused actual confusion for real developers doing ordinary web development work. One of the linked questions has hundreds of thousands of views. 2. You suggest I'm being a pedantic dick to people who are "helping others", but W3Schools doesn't help anyone - at least compared to the counterfactual of them not existing. It would hypothetically be right to say "okay, they have errors, but they're better than nothing" if the realistic alternative was "nothing". But the realistic alternative is that MDN would rise to the top of search results. The complaints about W3Schools' accuracy come in the context of them having skillfully SEOed their content above basically everything else, including huge amounts of not-for-profit content that is vastly superior to theirs. That does cause their very existence to do damage to the world, and make them worthy targets of criticism. 3. Remedying the point about the behaviour of colspan in real browsers being misdocumented doesn't require W3Schools to "write a novel" about anything. It just requires to them to remove content they've included which is false.
- johnmarcus 8y agonever understood people's hatred toward w3 schools. always seemed like it was a bunch of butt hurt developers whom were frustrated with their own shitty css that critiqued it the worst. i learned lots of usefull stuff from it when I started out 10 years ago.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoWhat I don't understand is how w3fools got onto their first ranking position for every single web dev topic there is on both ddg and G. 1) meaning w3schools not the w3fools parody site
- zaarn 8y agoPeople might want to be careful with all these domain names; they might loose them to the proper owner of the trademark or name (in this case w3schools.com).
- kevinsimper 8y agoI tried improving mdn with examples of window.alert, which is laughable right now, but my PR was not approved because MDN was structured differently than the browser API. https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples/pull/1266 https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples/pull/1266 Like the page literally, have a screenshot of a old school OS alert box? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/alert https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/aler...
- CydeWeys 8y agoAnd MDN is also using https://mdn.dev https://mdn.dev
- appsonify 8y agoW3schools helped me land my first job. I learned pretty much everything by reading through it, HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP, MySQL....don't get why people are bashing them, it was a great resource to have a around.
- bichiliad 8y agoIs there some ulterior motive behind W3Schools besides to teach people web stuff (and to maintain its own existence, which is no different than MDN)? I use MDN because Mozilla literally implements a browser, and I'm not the biggest fan of W3Schools, but this mostly just feels petty. Tons of people get valuable answers from both sites.
- bdorn 8y ago_Always_ MDN over W3. Especially if you're unfamiliar with a concept - the latter just creates a lapse in understanding.
- callahad 8y agoWe at Mozilla are glad folks love MDN, but domain squatting kinda sucks for everyone. MDN can stand on its own. :)
- fuball63 8y agoUnpopular opinion time, but MDN != W3schools. W3schools may have questionable content. It may have content that is not trendy or latest/greatest. The security concerns are important, but if we're really being honest with ourselves most of the vitriol is pedantic superiority complex attitude that permeates tech conversation. W3schools is a gateway to learn web technologies. If you go to the homepage, above the fold is tutorials, learn HTML, learn Javascript in plain sight. MDN is a search bar. I learned PHP in high school from w3schools. I don't use it now; I use the PHP docs. I learned how to host an HTML site from w3schools; now I reference Apache docs because I know what even a webserver is. I once got a CD from McDonalds that kickstarted me being a lifelong fan of one of my favorite artists. I'm sure all of the "hardcore" fans would look down on me for that too. Anyone serious about web dev pulls for multiple sources all of the time; probably from w3schools and mdn at the same time. People grow. Sites like this are important, although imperfect.