andreasbm/web-skills

Discuss whether resources from W3Schools should be included

ifndefdeadmau5 opened this issue · 3 comments

andreasbm commented

Thanks for opening this issue. Would you be able to elaborate to make it more constructive? Thanks! 👍

Slaviusz commented

What the OP probably means is that w3c schools have been known for misleading, incorrect or heavily outdated content in the past (not sure about present).

andreasbm commented

I will rename the issue to make it more constructive. I think it's fine to have a discussions whether W3Schools should be included or not. Here are some of the arguments that could be made why W3Schools in general should not be included:

  1. They have had misinformation in the past. Back in the days the website W3Fools was made to alert people of the misinformation and W3Schools has since upped their game and improved their site. Here's a nice read on the subject.
  2. Because of the name W3Schools, some people might think they are affiliated with W3C even though they are not. To be fair, they do address this on their about page.
  3. Even though the website is free they try to sell certificates that some people might think they are obligated to buy.

I do get why some people dislike W3Schools for the reasons mentioned above. For each resource I add to Web Skills I read it through to ensure a high quality. With 341 skills and 1422 resources some might have slipped through the filter, but for the most part I would say that the resources throughout the website are pretty high quality. Over time they should hopefully become even better as people open more issues. I'm looking at each resource on a case-by-case basis but I wouldn't have anything against excluding W3Schools in general if we have some more examples of why they should be entirely excluded.

To make the discussion a bit more concrete, here's an overview of the current resources from W3Schools throughout the website. I have added my current reasoning for including the resources.

W3Schools - HTML tags - This resource gives a good overview of the various HTML tags with links to pages that contain short descriptions and examples of how to use each tag.
W3Schools - Forms - This resource gives a good overview of how, why and when to use forms and inputs. It has a lot of visual examples.
W3Schools - HTML Coding Conventions - This resource has some good points and short examples of HTML coding conventions. Personally I would argue with the section "blank lines and indentation", but other resources discuss this from other point of views.
W3Schools - CSS Tutorial - This resource is a good introductory CSS course. Even though the content is fine, I dislike that the online certification thing is showed in the readers face on the first page. This is however only on the first page. 6 other resources link to places in this CSS course.
W3Schools - The JavaScript this Keyword - This resource briefly explains the this keyword with a couple of good examples.
W3Schools - JavaScript Style Guide and Coding Conventions - This resource has some good points. Personally I don't like that it encourages people to use spaces, but other resources discuss this from other point of views. I think people should be able to decide for themselves :-)
W3Schools - JS Best Practices - This resource has a lot of good points, but reading through this again I'm going to remove it in the next version as it uses the var keyword for the examples which is a bad practice.
W3Schools - Node.js tutorial - A fine introduction to node.