> The web site is easy to use and a great resource for beginners.

Yep a great resource, for wasting a ton of precious time in which they could have learned how to do things right instead of using techniques from ca. 2000.

> ...interested in the actual tutorials.

Which are still the worst part of the site.

Example (just clicked on one of their JS tutorials):

> JavaScript statements can be grouped together in blocks. > Blocks start with a left curly bracket {, and ends with a right curly bracket }. > The purpose of a block is to make the sequence of statements execute together.

Pure BS. JavaScript has no block scope. {} aren't needed for "executing stuff together".

Another thing they tell people is that "var foo = 2;" and "foo = 2;", are equal, more BS.

> If table based layout invalidates a site...

There is a difference in using a table layout because it's a good choice (Google doesn't validate in any way, the just want to cut down traffic, which makes sense for them) and just using it because, well... because one has no better idea.

As an aside, ES Harmony will have block-scoped bindings.

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let

Another great quote from w3schools:

> JavaScript can be used to validate data - A JavaScript can be used to validate form data before it is submitted to a server. This saves the server from extra processing

Sure! Always trust the client :)

I haven't seen the context of the original quote, but what you've quoted here is a valid statement and doesn't really have anything to do with what you're saying.

I'm in no way advocating client-side-only validation, but form validation on the client side to clean up mistakes can save a server round trip and a page reload, and so could save server side processing.

EDIT: just to clarify, I don't mean to turn this into a discussion with further nitpicking. I just thought your quote and comment were representative of some of the W3Fools content; picking a quote and interpreting it to mean what you want it to mean, and then criticizing it on that basis.

It only is a valid statement if you add the notes about always doing the validation server side too, and only using the JS one for improve UX.

But w3schools is read by beginners, they don't have any clue about web security whatsoever, if you don't tell them everything they will just go with the few things that you've told them.

That's the entire relevant context of the quote. It occurs in a list of what JavaScript is good for, and that's one of the items, with no further clarification. It definitely implies (though it doesn't explicitly require) client-only validation, since it talks about saving the server from having to do "extra processing" without qualification.