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)
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.
The background of W3Schools is that it is an advertisement money grabber which used to have very misleading information on how to build the web. They live by putting a lot of effort into SEO so that they keep staying on top of Google search queries and thus easy to find for those who don't know what they stand for. They also milk money with their name that resembles the official W3C while not having anything to do with them (they sell worthless diplomas). This is another reason why W3Schools has a bad reputation and why people don't like the site.
In my eyes this is just another example of how business centered on making money first results into questionable results when it comes to content. If I were to put money into learning programming I'd certainly consider almost any other place.
Maybe in the future W3Schools business model crumbles when privacy laws make it hard or impossible to make money by tracking people and their interests on the web.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's similar to the difference between elementary school and high school. We'd content is elementary, MDN is not.
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.
W3schools is basically a tutorial website named after W3C, which holds the relevant RFC and standards information that W3schools gives tutorials about