A lot of people on HN seem to have this opinion. A lot of the content on that site has been re-written, and it's now a pretty fantastic resource for beginners.
If you tell 2 beginners to build something with PHP/jQuery/JS, and send one person to W3Schools and the other to PHP.net/jquery.org/MDN, I have no doubt that the W3schools person will get something done in workable state faster.
i'm mostly upset that they use "w3" in their name to masquerade as an "official" source of documentation. i know their about page clears this up, but it's pretty buried.
Well perhaps W3C's official site would rank higher if it actually offered any tutorials, i.e. the thing people are searching for, as opposed to a list of specifications and draft specifications that won't be finalized for 10 years.
In any case, "W3" is just another representation of 'www', which the W3C doesn't have any kind of claim over.
OpenAI isn't open. W3Schools is unaffiliated with the W3C. The world keeps spinning.
That's optimistic, optimistically. It's a group of ivory tower academics with no stake in any browser implementation acting like they have any right to tell actual browser implementors how to behave.
I disagree, "w3" doesn't have any official connotation, it is literally the name of the thing they are teaching (or the alternate spelling of the abbreviation, but same thing). It is a common pattern for a school that teaches [thing] to call themselves "[thing] school", nothing wrong there.
What would be the point of that exercise though? It's true they might produce something faster, but if those sources are meant to be an educational resource then they'll learn more reading through actual documentation than copy-pasting questionable code to get something done.
I haven't noticed a difference since I first heard of the site. They may have corrected factual inaccuracies, but the overall organization and prioritization of information is not for me.
And if you tell 2 experts to build something with W3Schools as the resource against better documentation, I'm sure the results will be the opposite.
That's not the point though, I'm not going to say different strokes for different folks.
Instead I'd say, if that beginner uses the 'slower' path instead, that will pay dividends in time -- they are better of learning to use the docs than getting paid peanuts for delivering that project which depends on the juniors faster.
An expert wouldn't go to W3schools to begin with. They would have far more specific problems that would be better explored on Stack Overflow.
A beginner on the other hand would have their SO questions locked/closed within minutes because it would likely break any one of the thousand little rules SO has (to reduce duplicates) that are unknown to beginners.
Horses for courses; I read the official MDN and PHP docs now, but I didn't when I began because those sites assume an enormous amount of prior knowledge about programming.
This exactly. I still look to w3school over mdn if I can. The information is just friendlier. I'll use "proper" documentation if needed and never post anything to SO for the reasons you state.
My main issue with them is not their content proper, but that their SEO ranks them above much more topical results. That's clearly also Google's fault, but it's also clearly w3school's strategy.
Could I ask real quick why you dislike W3Schools? I def learned SQL syntax and basic HTML/CSS (I needed to use CSS selectors but had basically no knowledge) through them and actually thought to myself they did a great job at keeping things need-to-know for immediate use.
I have a feeling I know your answer - as a financial professional I initially used Investopedia in a pinch but over the years realized their accuracy has an inverse relation with the specificity of the topic. After seeing incorrect formulas and descriptions a handful of times, I eventually stopped using it completely.
