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An Ode To W3Schools

jonkuperman.com

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Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#11

Post by manaskarekar »

simonsarris wrote: post #3

I disagree and I don't think he really responded to any of the criticisms, just sort-of acknowledged them. > They Appear Affiliated With The W3C > For those in the know the W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, it is an international organization that governs the web. W3Schools rides off the notoriety of that name despite being unaffiliated. Is that really a complaint? How many _Java_Script developers are out there t…

I think the reason a lot of newbies start with them is because of a straight to the point easy to read format.

They may not be the most accurate or comprehensive, but the low barrier to entry is EXACTLY what newbies are looking for.

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#12

Post by jamesjporter »

simonsarris wrote: post #3

I disagree and I don't think he really responded to any of the criticisms, just sort-of acknowledged them. > They Appear Affiliated With The W3C > For those in the know the W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, it is an international organization that governs the web. W3Schools rides off the notoriety of that name despite being unaffiliated. Is that really a complaint? How many _Java_Script developers are out there t…

Let the record show: I'm trying to teach myself a bit of web design and I've so far found MDN to be a far better resource than W3Schools, so perhaps good behavior triumphs in the end?

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#13

Post by ChuckMcM »

nickpresta wrote: post #9
Diamons wrote: post #2

100% agree. I learned so much off W3Schools. Yeah, it's sometimes inaccurate. But the information is a million times better than reading some WC3 specs or Mozilla's developer guides. Often I see people link to MSDN or Mozilla's developer network when asked for how to learn web development, and all I think to myself as I see that is that if it were me, I would just quit. The content is explained in a way that's just n…

I would argue that http://htmldog.com/ or the MDN ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ ) are much better resources for even the newbie. Correct information always trumps easily accessible information. It isn't like the MDN is hard to navigate or anything, anyways. For comparison sake: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/articl... http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_article.asp With the exception of…

There is a huge difference between w3schools and these web sites, you can type in stuff on one side and see it on the other. I know that seems silly but its so helpful for people learning, is there anywhere else where they have that sort of setup?

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#14

Post by bpatrianakos »

In a nutshell the problem with W3Schools isn't any of the things the author points out. It's in the people learning from it. All good developers get to a point in their learning where they realize W3Schools is all the things the author points out and stops using it or very rarely uses it as a quick reference. That's fine. But then there's a whole other breed of developer who never move beyond what can be learned at W3Schools. They go on to write and share terrible code and teach others the least effective way to do things and that's where the harm in W3Schools lies. These are the same developers you find on Stackoverflow who post questions like "can you give me the code to run a Facebook clone".

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#15

Post by dorward »

rpm4321 wrote: post #8
simonsarris wrote: post #3

I disagree and I don't think he really responded to any of the criticisms, just sort-of acknowledged them. > They Appear Affiliated With The W3C > For those in the know the W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, it is an international organization that governs the web. W3Schools rides off the notoriety of that name despite being unaffiliated. Is that really a complaint? How many _Java_Script developers are out there t…

I've got to be honest, I've never made that connection. To me, W3 is simply a popular abbreviation for WWW, like "dub dub dub". When you think about it, at 9 syllables WWW has probably the highest word-length to syllable ratio out there.

Plenty of people have made the connection. I've frequently seen people refer to it as "W3C Schools" and complain to the W3C Validator's mailing list about the Validator rejecting code from "your site http://w3schools.com.

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#16

Post by imjared »

dmauro wrote: post #7

Learning to append MDN to all my searches helped me out a lot. MDN is just a much better resource. And before I caught on I did assume a certain credibility and relationship between W3schools and W3C.

If you use Google, you can add w3schools.com to your list of sites blocked in search results. I did this and it makes MDN my top result almost 100% of the time when searching for spec-related information.

link: http://www.google.com/reviews/t screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/2l2r3f3y1a3x

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#17

Post by nickpresta »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13
nickpresta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that http://htmldog.com/ or the MDN ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ ) are much better resources for even the newbie. Correct information always trumps easily accessible information. It isn't like the MDN is hard to navigate or anything, anyways. For comparison sake: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/articl... http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_article.asp With the exception of…

There is a huge difference between w3schools and these web sites, you can type in stuff on one side and see it on the other. I know that seems silly but its so helpful for people learning, is there anywhere else where they have that sort of setup?

There are many sites like that. The one I use most frequently is http://jsfiddle.net/

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#18

Post by dorward »

Their PHP+MySQL tutorial has an SQL injection vulnerability in every example that takes user input. It never mentions SQL injection as a possible problem and it never covers any of the techniques needed to defend against it.

In my book, that's unforgivable and they won't get any slack from me until they fix it.

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#19

Post by [deleted] »

dorward wrote: post #18

Their PHP+MySQL tutorial has an SQL injection vulnerability in every example that takes user input. It never mentions SQL injection as a possible problem and it never covers any of the techniques needed to defend against it. In my book, that's unforgivable and they won't get any slack from me until they fix it.

[deleted]

Re: An Ode To W3Schools

#20

Post by donebizkit »

W3Schools is a great resource for beginers and it should stay as it is: Simple. The minute you wiki-fy it, it'll become abstract and ground for ideological wars. Once you get your feet wet with their content then you move on to more advanced websites. As for the name issue, not a major issue.
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