I think there's a lot of unnecessary aggro in here just for the fact that it's from W3Schools. Yeah, MDN is a better source of record but W3schools often lays things out in a way that's easier for beginners to digest. I started with W3Schools before moving to MDN. It served a purpose.
I've heard it's way better than it used to be. It used to be a completely terrible resource but that was like 10-years ago. It's obivously had time to improve over the years.
One of the bad things in tech is that reputations stick and people are too quick to bad mouth something because of what it was like 10-15 years ago.
I occasionally used that site at least 20 years ago.
It seems to me that it serves the same audience as it did back then. You can quickly find useful pieces of information when you need them.
I don't get where did the bad rep come from. Did they show inaccurate information at some point?
I never noticed that.
What I did notice is that people are eager to compare them to MDN any time they are mentioned. Even the wikipedia page about them says "MDN Web Docs – similar website".
This is obviously my personal experience and I could have missed something.
Same here - I used it when I was writing DHTML on top of PHP 5, then years later when writing my blog, then from time to time when I had to touch the frontend. It's a nice resource for refreshing your memory of the basics, because the basics are front and center (one could say there are only basics there...) without distracting discussions of implementation details. When I need a detailed reference, I go somewhere else.
There definitely were problematic articles on the site, and its biggest contribution to my career was probably teaching me to cross-check my sources. There's a list of problems and nitpicks here[1] - apparently all of these were fixed over the years, hence why it's archived.
> I don't get where did the bad rep come from. Did they show inaccurate information at some point? I never noticed that.
Yea, they did. There was a massive campaign to get w3schools to fix their docs because it was out of date. The site is still alive https://www.w3fools.com/ but updated. But check out the wayback when machine to see about the errors.
