6 ms·

W3Fools Takes on W3Schools

87 points by stretchwithme 16y ago

aw3c2 16y ago
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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082089
- BonsaiDen 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    > 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 16y ago
      > 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 16y ago
        As an aside, ES Harmony will have block-scoped bindings. http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let
    - BonsaiDen 16y ago
      Another great quote from w3schools: > JavaScript can be used to validate data - A JavaScript can be used to validate form data before it is submitted to a server. This saves the server from extra processing Sure! Always trust the client :)
      - ttjervaag 16y ago
        I haven't seen the context of the original quote, but what you've quoted here is a valid statement and doesn't really have anything to do with what you're saying. I'm in no way advocating client-side-only validation, but form validation on the client side to clean up mistakes can save a server round trip and a page reload, and so could save server side processing. EDIT: just to clarify, I don't mean to turn this into a discussion with further nitpicking. I just thought your quote and comment were representative of some of the W3Fools content; picking a quote and interpreting it to mean what you want it to mean, and then criticizing it on that basis.
  - Isofarro 16y ago
    "The site is horrible. Period." w3fools.com isn't relatively better (compared with web development best practice at it's release, with the web development prevailing wisdom when w3schools.com launched). There are a litany of errors and mistakes in their own markup, so their quote of "W3Schools should both hold itself to, and be held to, the highest standards." is ironic - w3fools.com don't hold themselves up to these highest standards. Also ironic is the statement that W3Schools.com don't link to the "specs" (they mean W3C Recommendations, which aren't specifications or specs) - yet looking through that long page there's no obvious link to the very same Recommendations. Surely that's not a difficult or time-consuming thing to do? Their markup needs a good polish and refactor. It's littered with examples: * lack of accessibility appreciation, * non-understanding of descendent selectors in CSS, * the difference between emphasis and strong, * ignorance of CSS pseudo selectors, * lack of properly thought-out heading structure, * lack of appreciation as to what role="main" means, * marking up a series of paragraphs as an ordered list, * hiding asides and further information in HTML comments, * misunderstanding of what is and isn't UTF-8, * editorial changes to cited comments not marked up, * blockquotes lacking proper citation (in either of the two possible semantic approaches), * code fragments not marked up with code tags, * use of accesskeys, * lack of consistency over how an ellipsis is added to a page - they are using 4 different methods in one page, * using markup for a presentational effect instead of using appropriate logical markup, * lack of appreciation of "fragment" in document fragment identifiers. * And 2005 just called, they want their clearfix class back. As an example of best practice, their one page site falls below an acceptable level. Their message is useful - as is parts of W3Schools - but they are repeating the same mistake. Plus the overbearing righteous indignation that comes across in the largely copied and pasted mailing list isn't the right tone or approach. It's quite easy to pick apart nits in a site, it's quite another to demonstrate the ability to correctly explain the better ways of developing. This is no better than the anti-Internet Explorer rants. A negative slight at things because it's cool. The best way to usurp w3schools from the top of Google results is to write better content and share your wisdom. That however will involve bringing together a community focused on providing constructive and positively instructional material - that's something I'm unconvinced that the people behind w3fools.com can accomplish. There's already too much negativity and indignation in the site itself for any of it's creators to improve their credibility.
jpr 16y ago
What horrible website those W3Fools have.
webuiarchitect 16y ago
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 16y ago
  I didn't mean criticizing w3schools - I meant, I always wished for a better, refined and more practical oriented alternative.
acangiano 16y ago
I'm not so certain which ones are the fools.
smackay 16y ago
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 16y ago
  What's wrong with Mozilla Developer Network HTML and CSS references? https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference Granted, the HTML reference doesn't have by attribute directory.
  - evilpie 16y ago
    Atleast Global attributes are listed. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Global_attributes https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Global_attributes The rest should be easy to find in conjunction with some element.
  - joelanman 16y ago
    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 http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img
    - paulirish 16y ago
      Thanks very much for that feedback. I'm summarizing the discussion in order to deliver some actionable feedback to the Mozilla team. :)
  - 16y ago
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jonconley 16y ago
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.
spacemanaki 16y ago
"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...
tybris 16y ago
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.
kellishaver 16y ago
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.
- tomlin 16y ago
  I'd have to agree. W3Fools seems more like sacrimonious, armchair opinions than anything relevant, hopeful or helpful.
- beverloo 16y ago
  Building something new isn't exactly the problem - we could. There are several good alternatives around, most of which have been listed on the website itself. MDC is great and anyone can contribute. The problem is that W3Schools dominates the search results. If you search for "html colors", guess which website is at the top. This happens for much of the faulty pages as well.
  - mathias 16y ago
    +1. Note that this is also explained under the big “BUILD ONE YOURSELF” heading on http://w3fools.com/ http://w3fools.com/.
fourstar 16y ago
They did a terrible job of explaining WHY the practices from w3 are wrong. FAIL.
akavlie 16y ago
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.

87 points by stretchwithme 16y ago

aw3c2 16y ago

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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082089

BonsaiDen 16y ago
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 16y ago
  > 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 16y ago
    > 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 16y ago
      As an aside, ES Harmony will have block-scoped bindings. http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let
  - BonsaiDen 16y ago
    Another great quote from w3schools: > JavaScript can be used to validate data - A JavaScript can be used to validate form data before it is submitted to a server. This saves the server from extra processing Sure! Always trust the client :)
    - ttjervaag 16y ago
      I haven't seen the context of the original quote, but what you've quoted here is a valid statement and doesn't really have anything to do with what you're saying. I'm in no way advocating client-side-only validation, but form validation on the client side to clean up mistakes can save a server round trip and a page reload, and so could save server side processing. EDIT: just to clarify, I don't mean to turn this into a discussion with further nitpicking. I just thought your quote and comment were representative of some of the W3Fools content; picking a quote and interpreting it to mean what you want it to mean, and then criticizing it on that basis.
- Isofarro 16y ago
  "The site is horrible. Period." w3fools.com isn't relatively better (compared with web development best practice at it's release, with the web development prevailing wisdom when w3schools.com launched). There are a litany of errors and mistakes in their own markup, so their quote of "W3Schools should both hold itself to, and be held to, the highest standards." is ironic - w3fools.com don't hold themselves up to these highest standards. Also ironic is the statement that W3Schools.com don't link to the "specs" (they mean W3C Recommendations, which aren't specifications or specs) - yet looking through that long page there's no obvious link to the very same Recommendations. Surely that's not a difficult or time-consuming thing to do? Their markup needs a good polish and refactor. It's littered with examples: * lack of accessibility appreciation, * non-understanding of descendent selectors in CSS, * the difference between emphasis and strong, * ignorance of CSS pseudo selectors, * lack of properly thought-out heading structure, * lack of appreciation as to what role="main" means, * marking up a series of paragraphs as an ordered list, * hiding asides and further information in HTML comments, * misunderstanding of what is and isn't UTF-8, * editorial changes to cited comments not marked up, * blockquotes lacking proper citation (in either of the two possible semantic approaches), * code fragments not marked up with code tags, * use of accesskeys, * lack of consistency over how an ellipsis is added to a page - they are using 4 different methods in one page, * using markup for a presentational effect instead of using appropriate logical markup, * lack of appreciation of "fragment" in document fragment identifiers. * And 2005 just called, they want their clearfix class back. As an example of best practice, their one page site falls below an acceptable level. Their message is useful - as is parts of W3Schools - but they are repeating the same mistake. Plus the overbearing righteous indignation that comes across in the largely copied and pasted mailing list isn't the right tone or approach. It's quite easy to pick apart nits in a site, it's quite another to demonstrate the ability to correctly explain the better ways of developing. This is no better than the anti-Internet Explorer rants. A negative slight at things because it's cool. The best way to usurp w3schools from the top of Google results is to write better content and share your wisdom. That however will involve bringing together a community focused on providing constructive and positively instructional material - that's something I'm unconvinced that the people behind w3fools.com can accomplish. There's already too much negativity and indignation in the site itself for any of it's creators to improve their credibility.

jpr 16y ago

What horrible website those W3Fools have.

webuiarchitect 16y ago

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 16y ago
I didn't mean criticizing w3schools - I meant, I always wished for a better, refined and more practical oriented alternative.

acangiano 16y ago

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

smackay 16y ago

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 16y ago
What's wrong with Mozilla Developer Network HTML and CSS references? https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference Granted, the HTML reference doesn't have by attribute directory.
- evilpie 16y ago
  Atleast Global attributes are listed. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Global_attributes https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Global_attributes The rest should be easy to find in conjunction with some element.
- joelanman 16y ago
  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 http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img
  - paulirish 16y ago
    Thanks very much for that feedback. I'm summarizing the discussion in order to deliver some actionable feedback to the Mozilla team. :)
- 16y ago

hjkldfger 16y ago

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jonconley 16y ago

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.

spacemanaki 16y ago

"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...

tybris 16y ago

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.

kellishaver 16y ago

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.

tomlin 16y ago
I'd have to agree. W3Fools seems more like sacrimonious, armchair opinions than anything relevant, hopeful or helpful.
beverloo 16y ago
Building something new isn't exactly the problem - we could. There are several good alternatives around, most of which have been listed on the website itself. MDC is great and anyone can contribute. The problem is that W3Schools dominates the search results. If you search for "html colors", guess which website is at the top. This happens for much of the faulty pages as well.
- mathias 16y ago
  +1. Note that this is also explained under the big “BUILD ONE YOURSELF” heading on http://w3fools.com/ http://w3fools.com/.

fourstar 16y ago

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

akavlie 16y ago

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.