W3Fools - A W3Schools Intervention

Re:W3Fools - A W3Schools Intervention by justinph on Friday January 14, 2011 @12:51PM (#2104530)

I agree with the sentiment here, but not the way in which this goes about it. W3schools' name is a little scammy, but the info they house is useful.

The issues w3fools cite are pretty esoteric and/or very nit-picky. For instance:

  | www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_q.asp.
  | Browser Support. The <q> tag is supported in all major browsers, 
  | except Internet Explorer.
  This is blatantly false; <q> tags work just fine in IE8.

Uh, yeah, I guess it works just fine in IE8, but it doesn't work in IE6 or IE7, both of which are called 'Internet Explorer'. So saying it doesn't work in IE is technically correct. It just could be more specific.

W3schools obviously fills a niche that the W3C isn't filling. Reading a spec for HTML x.x is useful, but not viable when you're trying to get stuff done. W3Schools has gone through the work of reading the spec and turning it into a good reference. Good for them.

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Re:W3Fools - A W3Schools Intervention by bentruyman on Friday January 14, 2011 @12:57PM (#2104562)

I think the volume of incorrect information is relevant here. Even though you may consider your <q> example to be "nit-picky", the sheer amount of poor examples and incorrect interpretations shouldn't go ignored.

Not to mention attempts have been made to contact those behind W3Schools, and nothing has been done.

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Re:W3Fools - A W3Schools Intervention by rwaldron on Friday January 14, 2011 @01:04PM (#2104612)

"W3schools obviously fills a niche that the W3C isn't filling"

This alone is the biggest problem - that you think they are somehow related. They are not.

"W3Schools has gone through the work of reading the spec and turning it into a good reference"

No. You're wrong. THIS: http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/ecmascript/

...is a good reference based on a spec.

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Re:W3Fools - A W3Schools Intervention by justinph on Friday January 14, 2011 @01:14PM (#2104669)

I think your example proves my point perfectly. A blog post on this guy's website might be more technically correct and complete, but it certainly isn't easier to use, or actually reference when you just want to look up how the string.replace() method works, for instance. I think people are underestimating the utility of the easy organization that w3schools provides. They make it accessible, quickly.

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