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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 somethi

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/.
slexaxton 16y ago
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 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 16y ago

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/.

slexaxton 16y ago

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 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 16y ago