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I've seen several developers google "w3schools someDomEvent" because they are conditioned by those search results. Has it accidentally become a halfway useful

by bbarn 5y ago

I've seen several developers google "w3schools someDomEvent" because they are conditioned by those search results. Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site?

valenaut 5y ago
It's fine for simple things. I referenced it a lot when I was first learning JS and HTML because it was usually at the top of Google results. I think MDN is strictly better.
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Are you positive the first term wasn't prefixed by a hyphen-minus?
vlunkr 5y ago
IMO it is a legitimately useful site, but strictly for beginners, and probably only for html/css. It teaches you the basics and has the sandbox to test things out. It's fine, just not what you want to see when you're looking for actual documentation.
- myohmy 5y ago
  I used it to learn CSS way back in the day and it still seems to be a good balance between too little and too much for the beginner, so I still send my newbies there. Not surprised it shows higher than the actual spec. I think the HN community is just getting to the greybeard stage (I'm still cutting out grays), and this is our version of JUST READ THE MAN FILE
kilburn 5y ago
> Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site? It has. It is nowhere near the quality of MDN, but also nowhere nearly as bad as it used to be. W3Schools has less information than MDN. This is bad for the experienced, but a relief for people who are entering the trade. As an example, consider an inexperienced web developer that wants to do something when a button is clicked. They google for it and find these two pages: - https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp . Right there in the middle of the page is an example snippet that will get the job done. If I scroll down I see other ways to do it, all of them fully contained (i.e.: I can copy-paste it to some website and they will work). - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/click_event https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/cli... . There's a table of things I don't understand (Bubbles? Cancellable?), two lengthy discussions about weird edge cases in some browsers, and (finally!) a single not-so-simple example that is not even enclosed in <script> tags. What website do you think they'll pick?
blahyawnblah 5y ago
I do the same, but with "mdn" instead of "w3schools"

by bbarn 5y ago

I've seen several developers google "w3schools someDomEvent" because they are conditioned by those search results. Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site?

valenaut 5y ago

It's fine for simple things. I referenced it a lot when I was first learning JS and HTML because it was usually at the top of Google results. I think MDN is strictly better.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago

Are you positive the first term wasn't prefixed by a hyphen-minus?

vlunkr 5y ago

IMO it is a legitimately useful site, but strictly for beginners, and probably only for html/css. It teaches you the basics and has the sandbox to test things out. It's fine, just not what you want to see when you're looking for actual documentation.

myohmy 5y ago
I used it to learn CSS way back in the day and it still seems to be a good balance between too little and too much for the beginner, so I still send my newbies there. Not surprised it shows higher than the actual spec. I think the HN community is just getting to the greybeard stage (I'm still cutting out grays), and this is our version of JUST READ THE MAN FILE

kilburn 5y ago

> Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site? It has. It is nowhere near the quality of MDN, but also nowhere nearly as bad as it used to be. W3Schools has less information than MDN. This is bad for the experienced, but a relief for people who are entering the trade. As an example, consider an inexperienced web developer that wants to do something when a button is clicked. They google for it and find these two pages: - https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp . Right there in the middle of the page is an example snippet that will get the job done. If I scroll down I see other ways to do it, all of them fully contained (i.e.: I can copy-paste it to some website and they will work). - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/click_event https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/cli... . There's a table of things I don't understand (Bubbles? Cancellable?), two lengthy discussions about weird edge cases in some browsers, and (finally!) a single not-so-simple example that is not even enclosed in <script> tags. What website do you think they'll pick?

blahyawnblah 5y ago

I do the same, but with "mdn" instead of "w3schools"