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Lay off W3Schools

sagegerard.com

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Re: Lay off W3Schools

#81

Post by colmvp »

tkahn6 wrote: post #18
sachingulaya wrote: post #5

Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. It's jargon loaded and filled with a bunch of information that means nothing to beginners. Let's look the page for explaining 'div': http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp "The tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document. The tag is used to group block-elements to format them with styles." Oh, I get it. Its for grouping block-elements(??)…

> Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. I too had the exact opposite experience. I found the HTML, CSS, and Javascript tutorials extremely intuitive and well-presented when I was in 7th grade. I ate them up.

Same here. Vastly more readable for a novice (like myself at the time) than W3C.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#82

Post by maigret »

sachingulaya wrote: post #5

Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. It's jargon loaded and filled with a bunch of information that means nothing to beginners. Let's look the page for explaining 'div': http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp "The tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document. The tag is used to group block-elements to format them with styles." Oh, I get it. Its for grouping block-elements(??)…

Yes, a random page in w3schools is for developers, not for beginners. And yes, they do have tutorials where beginners should begin with. After the tutorial, they indeed know what a block element and a style is.

Google downgraded w3schools in search. It used to be constently the first result. Now it is rather 5th or 6th.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#83

Post by kamjam »

dorward wrote: post #69
qubot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Not necessarily, and bad code can make dangerous tutorials." W3Schools is not responsible for what devs do, and safe code means introducing more concepts that can leave the scope of a tutorial. I agree the code sucks, but we're talking about minimizing time to understand something, not security. Save that for the security tutorials.

How are people supposed to know that they need to go and find a separate security tutorial (and not a W3Schools one, they don't have one)? Following that tutorial introduces massive security holes into a site. Those security problems need to be discussed. At the very least they need a warning saying "Don't do this until you understand the security issues discussed in THIS OTHER GUIDE".

If people, beginners or not, come to w3schools and take it as the bible then they are in the wrong field and need to quit NOW.

I'd say it was fairly obvious that this is a bare bones basics site (I used it, albeit about 10 years ago) that needs to lead on to something else...

But granted they should may be put in a "next steps" type section of things people should read in to further.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#84

Post by luriel »

tkahn6 wrote: post #18
sachingulaya wrote: post #5

Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. It's jargon loaded and filled with a bunch of information that means nothing to beginners. Let's look the page for explaining 'div': http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_div.asp "The tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document. The tag is used to group block-elements to format them with styles." Oh, I get it. Its for grouping block-elements(??)…

> Except w3schools isn't approachable and it isn't for beginners. I too had the exact opposite experience. I found the HTML, CSS, and Javascript tutorials extremely intuitive and well-presented when I was in 7th grade. I ate them up.

It might be approachable, but that doesn't make it any less horrible.

Yes, some people find it useful when they don't know better, but I suspect those people at that point they would have found almost any tutorial useful.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#85

Post by maigret »

qubot wrote: post #56
petercooper wrote: post #53

I suspect that sources like W3Schools, the O'Reilly Missing Manual series and DirectXTutorial.com leave out good practices to avoid overwhelming the reader. This idea is sometimes called Wittgenstein's ladder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children - "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps…

I agree with everything but the last bit. If you throw away the ladder, doesn't that represent forgetting the information that actually helped you?

It helps. Let's take the example of numbers. You begin learning as a child with 1, 2, 3... Everything is an integer and begins with one. Rapidly, you learn the notion of 0. And then at school, at some point, come the negative numbers. You have to "throw the ladder" that numbers are integer and begin with 1. You still know how to count, indeed in a more complex way.

Let's say you begin with markup, and just put the style as a tag to begin with. At some point, you know what a style does, but you have to throw the ladder that it has to be inside the markup, and externalize it to .css file.

Learning is a progressive experience.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#87

Post by halefx »

qubot wrote: post #45
ricardobeat wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? The 2nd result (MDN) does the same, looks better, and almost never contains inaccuracies or bad practices. > it's reliable That's the whole point of w3fools: w3s is not reliable.

> "That's the point of w3fools: w3s is not reliable..." This unreliable (albeit crystal-clear) source did not stop me from scoring a good portfolio and happy clients ( http://linkd.in/ON5eHL ).

I'll bite.

It's possible that you have worked on more projects than are listed on Linkedin, but that's what you've offered as evidence of your "good portfolio" and growth as a developer (the reason, I assume, that you keep distancing yourself from those hapless beginners), so that's what I'll reply to.

You have three web projects and a personal website all listed on your profile.

1. "Metasyllabus Initiative": This is a generic Wordpress site using a contributed theme. I assume this is your first attempt at a personal blog. There doesn't appear to be anything technically special about it, and it hasn't been updated in 8 months. If you stick with web development, get used to that. I haven't updated my blog in a year and a half. Wordpress is great, though, because anyone can set it up and use it. Anyone.

2. "Decision Tree Generator": About as simple as it can get. An independent multi-page Javascript-dependent (Did you learn that on W3Schools?) post form that's easily broken and seems to offer very little utility to the user. The most complicated styling used in this project is probably the absolute-positioned results.

3. "OmicronAlpha.org": This site is down.

4. "www.sagegerard.com": I don't know any serious web developers who would use Concrete5, and the comments I've received even from novices about it (it seems to appeal primarily to novices) have all ended with disappointment.

My point is that you're still a beginner. As a beginner, you don't know as much as the people you're arguing with, and you're making yourself look a bit foolish. W3Schools is a fine resource for anyone who knows that it's often unsafe, inaccurate, and wrong. However, the people who know that don't use W3Schools. My biggest problems with W3Schools (other than the inaccurate information) are that 1) they don't explain that they are not associated in any way with the W3C and 2) they sell overpriced certifications that require a user learns inaccurate information.

I read an article a few years ago (that I'm not possibly going to look for now) about best practices when creating examples and guides. The most important lesson in the article was that you should almost never show wrong examples or antipatterns. I.e., don't show an example of what NOT to do. The reason was that the novice ends up remembering the wrong examples as often (or possibly more often) as the good examples. At that point, the example/guide has failed. That's what W3Schools does. They can add as many disclaimers to their site as they want, but that doesn't change the result. They aren't just not doing as much to help people as they could. They're doing harm to the internet.

And by the way, the second sentence of your blog post is both ambiguous and wrong. Was W3Fools created in 2008 (It wasn't.)? Or did W3Fools teleport back in time to only criticize a 2008 version of W3Schools (They didn't.)?

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#88

Post by maigret »

ricardobeat wrote: post #79
pbreit wrote: post #70

W3Schools is not perfect but it is the best HTML/CSS reference that I've seen. The W3Fools effort is sort of well-intentioned but overly disrespectful. The supposed alternatives linked from W3Fools are hideous. W3Fools energy would be _MUCH_ better spent on developing an alternative.

We have MDN, dochub, sitepoint, etc, they all have up-to-date, correct content. We don't need another one. What's hideous about them?

MDN: Too Mozilla centric. I certainly hate devs who make Firefox-only pages more than ones who look up on w3schools. And I've met a few of them ;)

dochub: Where are the tutorials?

Sitepoint: The structure is messy. It looks like a blog, but a historical structure is awful for learning. I want topic categories. Also lots of things I don't care about - books, courses - I just want references and tutorials! MDN is better from this side.

I'm not convinced. You're not going to kill w3schools if you don't understand why so many folks go to that site.

Personally I didn't know dochub, and might probably get back soon on this site. It's clean, and the information is useful, but only when you already understand well what you're doing. It's not for learning the Web concepts. Also, it misses direct mention of browser support for every feature.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#89

Post by Confusion »

ricardobeat wrote: post #48
qubot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "That's the point of w3fools: w3s is not reliable..." This unreliable (albeit crystal-clear) source did not stop me from scoring a good portfolio and happy clients ( http://linkd.in/ON5eHL ).

Working on a crappy Fujitsu laptop for years didn't stop me either, but I don't go out of my way to defend it. Your point seems to be that w3schools has a special place in your heart. Okay.

There's a lesson for entrepreneurs here: w3schools makes people happy, despite containing inaccuracies and being far from perfect. It's good enough and was the best available for a long time.

Re: Lay off W3Schools

#90

Post by DanBC »

qubot wrote: post #13
DanBC wrote: post #8

> W3Schools has already announced that it's content should be used at the user's risk, which means they waive all responsibility for inexperienced users. It is not their job to babysit developers, since it is the developer's job to research other sources and improve his understanding through rigorous practice and peer feedback. That's awful advice for beginners, who have no idea why some things are good and others ar…

> "That's awful advice for beginners" It's not bad advice to suggest that developers be stupid if they are the type to learn from their mistakes. If they are not the type to learn from their mistakes, why are we worried about them?

Being given correct information but making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes in your efforts to recreate the good advice, is a useful learning technique.

Being given incorrect information, and making mistakes, and not knowing you've made mistakes, is not a useful learning technique.

And while these people are making mistakes and learning from them their customers are suffering buggy code and everything that goes with that - data loss and insecurity at the extreme end and unexpected behaviour at the mild end.

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