Last week a website dedicated to criticizing the popular tutorial site W3Schools, called W3Fools, launched. Reaction from the development community to W3Fools has been mixed. Today, W3Schools responded to our request for comment: “The W3Fools.com website/project is different compared to single user comments, but we always appreciate suggestions on how we can improve W3Schools.”
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W3Schools began correcting content in its tutorials almost immediately after the launch of W3Fools. The corrections are noted by strike through on the W3Fools website. However, either the corrections have stopped or the updates on W3Fools have stopped. No corrections have been noted in the JavaScript tutorial, perhaps the one that W3Fools criticized most harshly.
As we noted in our earlier story, a commenter at the W3Schools forum using the name boen_robot took issue with some of W3Fools criticisms. boen_robot noted that some of the mistakes pointed out on the forum have since been fixed on the W3Fools forum. The commenter adds “I wish they could… I don’t know… wikify their page or let people post comments… oh, the irony.”
Although some of W3Fools’ examples are nitpicky, some are more serious – such as the pervasive use of document.write in the JavaScript tutorial. Even this, though, is still a matter of debate among developers. The discussion on Reddit is interesting with regards to relevance of the criticisms.
W3Fools suggests Mozilla’s documentation as an alternative to W3Schools. However, some have pointed out that W3Schools’ tutorials are more friendly to beginners. On a Hacker News thread on W3Fools a commenter using the name bermanoid notes that Mozilla’s XPath documentation recommends W3Schools’ tutorial. This demonstrates the role that W3Schools plays on the Web and the difficulty faced in replacing it.
The best outcome of all of this would be for W3Schools to improve its tutorials – which is the stated goal of W3Fools. That seems to be happening, if slowly.
It would also probably be best for everyone if W3Schools acknowledged on its front page that it is not associated with the W3C.
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