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
by manaskarekar on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:02AM
(#4803155)
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.
I disagree. The reason a lot of newbies start with W3Schools is because they're the plague of Google search results. Popularity isn't everything. If it was, we'd all be promoting Nicki Minaj as the definitive source of quality music.
That may be why they start, but nobody would come back if the site wasn't so terribly useful, concise and easy to navigate.
Re:An Ode To W3Schools
by garethadams on Monday November 19, 2012 @05:46AM
(#4803793)
The people who are using W3Schools are, almost by definition, the kinds of people who don't know that the site has glaring errors, and can't spot when the page they're looking at is wrong.
Imagine if you were using a calculator to help calculate dimensions for a house. But unknown to you, 1 in 20 calculations you make came out with an answer that was 10% out. Is that calculator useful because 95% of the time you get the correct answer, much faster than you could have found it yourself?
Nobody ever navigate in w3schools, they come back from Google each time.
Re:An Ode To W3Schools
by jamesjporter on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:08AM
(#4803170)
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
by KaoruAoiShiho on Monday November 19, 2012 @02:23AM
(#4803316)
Only problem is that MDN's load times are ass, W3Schools is much faster. This single thing is 99% of the reason why W3Schools will continue to be favored by most people (imo).
No, the single thing that will keep people using w3schools is that they have managed to permanently glue themselves to the top of any Google search related to HTML or JS. Back when Google's site-blocking feature was enabled, they used mirrored domains to keep themselves in your results if you tried to block them. That is, you'd block "www.w3schools.com", and then your searches would have "wwww.w3schools.com" right up at the top.
It's really surprising to me, with abusive tactics like that, that Google hasn't penalized their page rank.
It's like the private Federal Reserve and Federal Express.
Same goes for Stella Artois, owned by Anheuser-Busch
I've never met anyone thinking Stella Artois was a microbrew. Interesting to learn this about Blue Moon though.
It's fun sometimes to go through the beer aisle and look at the company information on the bottom of the bottle 6-pack. You'd be surprised who owns what.
Re:An Ode To W3Schools
by seriocomic on Monday November 19, 2012 @05:58AM
(#4803828)
Wow. I am really ashamed to admit, despite years of SitePoint, Mozilla Forums and StackExchange use, that I have never come across the MDN :/
> 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 that think this is an issue?
I think this is my biggest issue with W3SChools and he just kind of brushes it off.
Masquerades of this kind have always been a pet peeve, such as how all Blue Moon materials try very hard to present it as a microbrew, when its a Coors product. People think they're supporting some small company, and Coors is intentionally duping them.
JavaScript, by the way, was a name change based on a mutual co-marking deal. W3School's name is not.
> [about Wikifying] Again, I’d love to see it happen – but that doesn’t mean it should happen.
Funny, I just edited the MDN today. It is a far better resource, wiki-fied, with no ads, and Mozilla is always looking for helpers. If you'd love to see it happen, help it happen.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
"It's the Web. You drive."
(In traditional HN fashion I'd like to write an Ode to the MDN post, alas I haven't got the time tonight!)