I just pulled up the page for String.match, which is a weird function because it returns an array that has named properties on it. W3Schools doesn't mention that. It just says it "method returns an array with the matches." It also doesn't mention the behavior without the global flag. I also noticed a misspelling ("Differense").
Comparing these two pages, only the second one is competent at describing what the function actually does. Neither is perfect. The MDN doesn't do a great job of communicating all the information, but at least all of the information is there.
Tangent: why is .match on Symbol? I read through string.match and looked at Symbol and I don’t understand why all these helpful functions exist on Symbol.
I would say they haven't changed much over the years, but I always quite liked them for just getting answers to simple things fast.
MDN is of course fantastic, but generally requires more reading/scrolling and is therefore slower for simple things like what's the markup for a button or select drop down thing look like again.
As for the w3.css style sheet, it's quite good for sprucing up small internal web apps.
You nailed it about the appeal of W3: It's quick to get to the point.
I can read the first para and figure out what I'll be learning. The code examples are interactive and visual, and help enormously.
MDN reads like a technical reference. Wordpress documentation is similarly structured, but it has a comments section with a lot of sample code for different use cases, which helps me figure out whether the function I'm looking at will help accomplish what I am trying to do.
> The `margin-block` CSS shorthand property defines the logical block start and end margins of an element, which maps to physical margins depending on the element's writing mode, directionality, and text orientation.
Whew, that's a lot.
Setting aside how inside baseball the terms "logical block" and "physical margin" are, this description fails to tell the reader why they would want to use this property. Why use this, instead of `margin`? It's nowhere on the page. Typically, that reasoning lays buried in the distant and forbidden "Guides" section (which MDN's search doesn't index).
“But look, you found the explanation for `margin-block`, didn’t you?”
“Yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'”
Tried learning HTML/CSS through that site in 2006. Terrible experience, so I continued to use Dreamweaver for personal projects.
Tried learning again in 2014, after a career change: Excellent experience, so good that I go there first.
I simply did not grok responsive design until I read their article about floats and media queries. I was trying to get admitted into a bootcamp at the time, and my assignment was to recreate a landing page from a PNG image, without using Bootstrap or any other grid framework.
Most official sources of technical documentation online are written by and for developers, and assume a lot of prior knowledge. I never understood a lick of the official jQuery documentation either, until I went through W3schools section on it, and then later Jon Duckett's beautifully visual dead-tree book on JS and jQuery.
I can only judge them based on CSS and PHP content because those are the things I can even properly compare. W3schools continue to be a very low quality resource, incomplete and incoherent on most aspects.
There is a "try it yourself" that I sometimes use, merely because it's quick to whip something up, and much more faster than codepen.
Eh. I'm the same as GP, because back before learned that behavior, w3schools had plenty of straight up wrong information. So their question still stands: have they gotten better?
No. The issue is that it's sometimes OK, sometimes good and sometimes hilariously bad. I don't want to play russian roulette with docs so I installed W3School blocker extension to weed out the problem at the root :)
I wrote a search-result filter extension (actually TamperMonkey script) just for w3schools, many years ago! Then I added all those auto-generated comparison sites: stackshare, wikidiff, etc.
It's satisfying to see that my dislike is not some unfounded personal quirk!
They have some good resources for obscure technologies, like XPath, but for the big ones like HTML/CSS/JS there's both the danger that they're out of date and not showing you what's new, while also possibly showing you old hacks and workarounds that are against modern best practice.
MDN is a better choice for (almost) anything MDN has content for.
How much of the core of HTML/CSS/JS has been deprecated?
Somebody going to W3schools probably isn't looking for the latest and greatest. The person who is looking for that would already have a good grasp of the fundamentals, and would have graduated to looking elsewhere, like StackOverflow or Caniuse.com.
I'm not an expert, but W3 schools uses <br> in their examples which is a bad way of teaching since my understanding is that there is never a good reason to use a <br> especially not to format a page, which is a habit I had to drop because I learned it from w3.
What’s wrong with <br>? It’s a perfectly semantic way to insert a line break. I use it often when I’m trying to get a block of text to look good at multiple breakpoints.
They definitely updated the content of the site. But they left the look (color scheme, etc) largely unchanged from the 2000s, so opening the site probably reminds some people of the bad old days.
I think there's a lot of unnecessary aggro in here just for the fact that it's from W3Schools. Yeah, MDN is a better source of record but W3schools often lays things out in a way that's easier for beginners to digest. I started with W3Schools before moving to MDN. It served a purpose.
I've heard it's way better than it used to be. It used to be a completely terrible resource but that was like 10-years ago. It's obivously had time to improve over the years.
One of the bad things in tech is that reputations stick and people are too quick to bad mouth something because of what it was like 10-15 years ago.
I occasionally used that site at least 20 years ago.
It seems to me that it serves the same audience as it did back then. You can quickly find useful pieces of information when you need them.
I don't get where did the bad rep come from. Did they show inaccurate information at some point?
I never noticed that.
What I did notice is that people are eager to compare them to MDN any time they are mentioned. Even the wikipedia page about them says "MDN Web Docs – similar website".
This is obviously my personal experience and I could have missed something.
I think here it means you don't need to buy a license or sign up to any terms and conditions, which would be in line with the MIT license in the github repository.
Okay, you have to admit them tagging all the classes with a W3- prefix is kind of funny. Looks like their SEO spam approach leaked out to their framework also.
But I agree with most people, this site will never recover from its poor reputation. And that’s also their business model.
We can only hope Google will eventually tone down how much their site appears in search queries for topics they provide no in-depth information for.
All css frameworks really should prefix their classes so you can mix them.
And I hope that Google keeps showing them in search results, because while MDN is great for in-depth information, most of the time I just need a quick reference of common attributes, and no I don't want it cluttered with a bunch of in-depth information when I am just trying to see what the correct word for something is and how to spell it.
Both W3 and MDN are valuable resources for different use cases.
I mean, you are more than welcome to share a subjective opinion. "In-depth" in this context means actual relevant content and not a few lines of text. Yeah, sure, one-liners are great and I myself have to Google them all the time because I forget the different variables that shorthand's can take, but W3Schools is on another level when it comes to this.
They inherited their authority from a time when content on the web was sparse and thin as a rail. The argument here is not that they don't provide _any_ useful information, the argument is that the inherited authority is making them first results for queries were they obviously should not be first.
I might be accused of ageism, but honestly, I think the ratio of young and very young programmers to mature ones is what makes for all the tribalism and drama within the community. Of course, there are old folks who still behave like they're in high school. I think it's a nature of the profession to attract such people, so we won't ever be completely free of them, but from my observation - most older (since when 40+ is old, right...) programmers tend to be much more level-headed and way less emotional with regards to tools they use.
W3 school's previous focus on SEO over accuracy is pretty well known. If you break your users' or audience's trust, it turns out that can have lasting impact.
There is of course that nuclear option of blocking the site entirely on search results using a browser addon. I block w3schools, Pinterest, and a bunch of GitHub/stackoverflow scrapers, and didn't miss a thing.
What the heck IS w3schools? i.e who is behind it, where did it come from, where is it going?
It's always there and seemingly always BEEN there, and it always comes up in my search results and indeed I often use it and the info seems pretty good.
But apart from that, how can something so well used basically fly under the radar?
As one comment under said, it's a small Norwegian family company (5 employees) that's been around since at least 1998. And they've always focused on what they do.
From open Norwegian business data (https://www.proff.no/selskap/refsnes-data-as/sandnes/it-kons...), it seems like they have a yearly revenue around $4.5M USD. From the annual salary expenses, those five employees either make bank - or they hire a lot of consultants from overseas.
So I guess it's a good example of first-mover advantage.
Most people seem to think w3schools has some form of association with the W3C. It is actually run by a small family company, Refsnes Data AS, from Sandnes, a depressing city on the western coast of Norway.
It's how I learned web development 20 something years ago. They have simple, clear, entry level tutorials on HTML, CSS, JS and a number of other languages that give you enough to become somewhat productive on the web, so you can be interested in deeper content. It's an institution.
I downloaded the W3Schools offline dump zip archive, which was under 50mb IIRC, from a friend when I first started learning programming because I didn't have access to proper internet. That helped me a lot to learn to code.
Good for minimal stuff that’s fire and forget. Their official GitHub Repo is not in sync with the latest release on their website. CSS classes often contain !important rules which makes it harder to customize. No use of css variables so good luck with darkmode. They don’t make use of flexbox or css grid.
A
I'm not a frontend person and I'm attracted to simplicity. I can certainly believe this is not good, but do you know if there are good minimal alternatives like this? Bootstrap seems a bit complex for basic stuff.
Bulma is smaller. But I feel CSS frameworks are not much flexible, which may explain their decay. Also, frontend modern tooling helps you build your own components with minimal CSS helpers, like Tailwind.
Readit News
Has w3schools gotten any better over the years? Would anyone consider using this or any package from them?
=> https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_match.asp
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Comparing these two pages, only the second one is competent at describing what the function actually does. Neither is perfect. The MDN doesn't do a great job of communicating all the information, but at least all of the information is there.
MDN is of course fantastic, but generally requires more reading/scrolling and is therefore slower for simple things like what's the markup for a button or select drop down thing look like again.
As for the w3.css style sheet, it's quite good for sprucing up small internal web apps.
I can read the first para and figure out what I'll be learning. The code examples are interactive and visual, and help enormously.
MDN reads like a technical reference. Wordpress documentation is similarly structured, but it has a comments section with a lot of sample code for different use cases, which helps me figure out whether the function I'm looking at will help accomplish what I am trying to do.
Deleted Comment
Check out this page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/margin-bloc...
> The `margin-block` CSS shorthand property defines the logical block start and end margins of an element, which maps to physical margins depending on the element's writing mode, directionality, and text orientation.
Whew, that's a lot.
Setting aside how inside baseball the terms "logical block" and "physical margin" are, this description fails to tell the reader why they would want to use this property. Why use this, instead of `margin`? It's nowhere on the page. Typically, that reasoning lays buried in the distant and forbidden "Guides" section (which MDN's search doesn't index).
To find our reasoning, you must go to Guides, under CSS expand "CSS building blocks," then finally click "Handling different text directions": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_...
“But look, you found the explanation for `margin-block`, didn’t you?”
“Yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'”
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...
I only need MDN when I want to read stuff 'deep', but 98% of the time I don't need that depth.
MDN is also hard to navigate, it works like a thick dictionary to me, it will be needed, but only rarely.
Tried learning again in 2014, after a career change: Excellent experience, so good that I go there first.
I simply did not grok responsive design until I read their article about floats and media queries. I was trying to get admitted into a bootcamp at the time, and my assignment was to recreate a landing page from a PNG image, without using Bootstrap or any other grid framework.
Most official sources of technical documentation online are written by and for developers, and assume a lot of prior knowledge. I never understood a lick of the official jQuery documentation either, until I went through W3schools section on it, and then later Jon Duckett's beautifully visual dead-tree book on JS and jQuery.
There is a "try it yourself" that I sometimes use, merely because it's quick to whip something up, and much more faster than codepen.
MDN is a bit technical at times and doesn’t always have detailed examples a beginner might hope for.
Yeah. I prefer it to MDN sometimes because they usually have a "try it yourself" that actually works very well.
Doesn't matter how much better the MDN doc might be, I often just want to try it myself.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
It's satisfying to see that my dislike is not some unfounded personal quirk!
W3schools has gotten a lot better I’ve the past 5 years or so. I use it for quick lookups and only go to mdn when I’m trying to learn something new.
MDN is a better choice for (almost) anything MDN has content for.
Somebody going to W3schools probably isn't looking for the latest and greatest. The person who is looking for that would already have a good grasp of the fundamentals, and would have graduated to looking elsewhere, like StackOverflow or Caniuse.com.
!mdn search term
brings you directly to MDN's search result page for search term.
Their website has, no idea about the company itself tho.
It’s probably the best and easiest to use css/js/html reference site anywhere.
I can’t gauge how it’s changed but I find it’s to-the-point and example driven format is perfect for the way I learn.
w3schools got way better, but back then w3fools had its reason.
One of the bad things in tech is that reputations stick and people are too quick to bad mouth something because of what it was like 10-15 years ago.
I occasionally used that site at least 20 years ago. It seems to me that it serves the same audience as it did back then. You can quickly find useful pieces of information when you need them.
I don't get where did the bad rep come from. Did they show inaccurate information at some point? I never noticed that.
What I did notice is that people are eager to compare them to MDN any time they are mentioned. Even the wikipedia page about them says "MDN Web Docs – similar website".
This is obviously my personal experience and I could have missed something.
Edit: Looks like the GitHub repo does have a license and it’s a proper MIT license.
https://github.com/JaniRefsnes/w3css
But I agree with most people, this site will never recover from its poor reputation. And that’s also their business model.
We can only hope Google will eventually tone down how much their site appears in search queries for topics they provide no in-depth information for.
And I hope that Google keeps showing them in search results, because while MDN is great for in-depth information, most of the time I just need a quick reference of common attributes, and no I don't want it cluttered with a bunch of in-depth information when I am just trying to see what the correct word for something is and how to spell it.
Both W3 and MDN are valuable resources for different use cases.
They inherited their authority from a time when content on the web was sparse and thin as a rail. The argument here is not that they don't provide _any_ useful information, the argument is that the inherited authority is making them first results for queries were they obviously should not be first.
I don't believe that would work out.
W3 schools is a wonderful, excellent site.
Dropping w3- in front of their classes is so you can drop it in anywhere. It’s actually rather brilliant and has been helpful in many cases for me.
I don’t get the w3 schools hate-flex. Programmers judge other programmer choices too much.
> But I agree with most people, this site will never recover from its poor reputation. And that’s also their business model.
They don't care of reputation, they care about 1st places in google queries :)
> I agree with most people
Taking the thread as a representative dataset, it seems like a pretty even split.
It's always there and seemingly always BEEN there, and it always comes up in my search results and indeed I often use it and the info seems pretty good.
But apart from that, how can something so well used basically fly under the radar?
From open Norwegian business data (https://www.proff.no/selskap/refsnes-data-as/sandnes/it-kons...), it seems like they have a yearly revenue around $4.5M USD. From the annual salary expenses, those five employees either make bank - or they hire a lot of consultants from overseas.
So I guess it's a good example of first-mover advantage.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were objectively incorrect design decisions here.
The final straw was when I visited the "Cards" component - my God.
Comparing this to Bootstrap? It's Bootstrap by a landslide.
https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_images.asp