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St Paulis
St Paulis

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Is W3Schools deprecated? Why?

I usually see people correcting posts and try to pass the message that W3Schools is not good point of truth, like the image of this article (as you can see, 5 people find the answer useful but 7 people agreed that the link to W3Schools should be replaced, although the replacement link was broken).

Why is that? I have been helped from W3Schools many times and I find the specific platform very easy to use and the playground seems to be solid and fun.

I would like to hear more haters and lovers of W3Schools, thanks everyone for your time.

Top comments (10)

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levisnkyyyy profile image
Levisnkyyyy β€’

What I know today is because of w3schools. It DID NOT teach me a lot! it gave me a basic, starter-friendly explanation of how things work.

Many people say w3schools is unprofessional, I can even agree with it, it's not the level you should be looking for if you want to land a job, but imo it's the best start.

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duchesstoffee profile image
Hannah Ong β€’

Contrary to what the name might imply, W3Schools is not affiliated with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium (source). W3C on the other hand is the organization that creates and maintains the standards for the World Wide Web. If you want to know about how things should work on the web, W3C is the authoritative source.

However, most people will have a hard time understanding the original source which is why we have sites like W3Schools and MDN Web Docs. Now the main difference between W3Schools and MDN is that MDN is affiliated with W3C (source), and so MDN is a much more viable resource to rely on as they will keep their pages up to date and in alignment with W3C.

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annietaylorchen profile image
Annie Taylor Chen β€’ β€’ Edited

It’s still available? I do think it’s very beginner friendly but sometimes it has mistakes such as teaching wrong concepts, which can be very bad for beginners as they don’t know if it’s wrong. After I discovered such a mistake, I stopped using it or only use it as a reference but will double check for correctness on mdn. I understand mdn is very daunting for beginners especially those who haven’t been tortured by computer science textbooks yet lol.

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lionelrowe profile image
lionel-rowe β€’

It's not deprecated, it's just that better sources exist (such as the excellent MDN).

Some people say it's better for beginners, but I tend to disagree. Articles on W3Schools, while usually factually correct (unlike a few years ago), often miss out important details and "gotchas" that would be useful for beginners to know.

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johnkazer profile image
John Kazer β€’

There is no clear "right away" to build a front end so as a beginner I found their pages a great source of info to get going with. You don't need to know build tools and frameworks just get started with stuff that works.

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden β€’

w3schools used to be a joke they had inaccurate information. These days they are a lot better but some people still judge them because of how they were back in the day.

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jwp profile image
JWP β€’

It's similar to the difference between elementary school and high school. We'd content is elementary, MDN is not.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao β€’

Some people just think it's old i guess and not up to date. But I think i would use it than stack overflow as it is really a hit and many misses to me.

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dealloc profile image
Wannes Gennar β€’

W3schools is basically a tutorial website named after W3C, which holds the relevant RFC and standards information that W3schools gives tutorials about

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