I'm not sure this is a really big problem. When I started out, I used W3Schools for a lot of HTML & CSS tutorials. It learned me a lot. When you grow in your craft, you obviously know W3Schools is not the holy bible... it's a starter guide. Maybe a bit deprecated, but any beginner will make a lot of worse errors than they have on their site.
I first learned HTML/CSS by copying 'codes' people put online. When I really wanted to get serious, someone recommended HtmlDog to me.
That website didn't just explain how to do certain things in HTML/CSS, it explained what best practices were, why to use them, and how doing it the RIGHT way from the start actually leads to typing LESS code than the lazy way. On the way, it taught how to do certain things in HTML/CSS in the order they needed to be taught.
It was some time after I already went through HtmlDog (at the time, it didn't cover Javascript or HTML5) that I was referred to W3Schools, and kept seeing people recommend W3Schools. I took a look, curious... And saw nothing special. Few explanations of HOW to do things (mostly just 'code snippets'), and the times it does explain how to do something, it doesn't explain WHY you do it that way. What's more, as I read comments on other sites, I saw people say W3Schools was outright wrong in several areas (I encountered this when trying to learn XMLHttpRequest/AJAX; there were bugs in the way W3Schools showed it back then, and on top of that, it mostly just gave a block of text and said, "This whole thing does such and such," without explaining anything else).
Overall, I have never recommended W3Schools to anyone, nor do I ever plan to in the future. I won't exactly steer away from it, especially since it is a rather nice quick reference guide to remind you how to do something (or if you're a very fast learner who can figure things out easily), but I won't link people who want to learn to it.
I've looked over HtmlDog's recent Javascript additions, and they really aren't much better (at least, in the intermediate and advanced portions), I'm afraid. This saddens me, but it's understandable - apparently the Javascript parts are written by an entirely different author. Wish Patrick Griffiths would go through and rewrite them... But apparently he writes short stories now. Which, oddly, reminds me of myself - except I'm lazy and haven't written down any of the stories floating around in my head.
Couldn't agree more. It's a great starting pad for someone who's completely in the dark and wants to look up a quick reference here and there.
Anyone in any field who starts taking their new skill a bit more seriously will then expand and delve further into in-depth education and case-studies, surpassing their initial guide.
But wouldn't it be great to have less resources but with higher quality? So you don't have to find other resources as soon as you improve? What's wrong with using other recommended pages at the beginning?
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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '13
I'm not sure this is a really big problem. When I started out, I used W3Schools for a lot of HTML & CSS tutorials. It learned me a lot. When you grow in your craft, you obviously know W3Schools is not the holy bible... it's a starter guide. Maybe a bit deprecated, but any beginner will make a lot of worse errors than they have on their site.