I can't help but feel that all of that time and effort they spent criticizing and nitpicking could have been spent building something better. If this is something they really feel passionately about, rather than just a way to amuse themselves with angry rants, then all that energy could have been put to so much better use.
I guess it's easier to hate and claim to be taking the high ground than it is to actually put forth an effort to make the state of things better-which says more about them than it does W3Schools, and probably says a lot about human nature in general, really.
W3Schools is not without its many and varied problems, both in content and, as others have said, its own code base, but so is nearly every other tutorial or web programming site on the internet that's more than, say, a year old. The 'net is litered with old content that often can be difficult for new developers to filter out and know what's good and what's not. Just look at the volume of old, horrible PHP tutorials floating around, or even old Rails code. The main difference is that a lot of people will see W3Schools and assume it is associated with the W3, so they might take it as being a more reliable source.
I'm not sure how actively W3Schools is updated, but if they have a staff maintaining it and actively develop and write content for the site and they're not replacing the old with the new, then yes, that's just lazy and they should be doing better, but tutorial sites containing old, bad code and coding practices is certainly nothing unique to W3Schools.
Building something new isn't exactly the problem - we could. There are several good alternatives around, most of which have been listed on the website itself. MDC is great and anyone can contribute.
The problem is that W3Schools dominates the search results. If you search for "html colors", guess which website is at the top. This happens for much of the faulty pages as well.
I'm really confused by the notion of the "In the time this article took, they could have built a better one" arguments.
I don't know how long you think it took ( https://github.com/paulirish/w3fools ) but it took a couple of hours of time from a few people over about a week.
I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a lot longer than a week.
And just because the creators didn't build a clone of w3schools, doesn't mean they aren't contributing useful information back to the various communities affected by the nonsense published at w3schools. Every single one of them are writing blog posts and submitting to open source projects, hosting podcasts, helping on IRC channels and forums, and building helpful websites to learn exactly the same stuff found on w3schools, except with valid information.
The creators of w3fools have no issue with the other resources that are available that they suggested as alternatives. For more specific beginner data, there are numerous walkthroughs and helpful answers littered across the internet with the correct information in them. Creating yet another site that puts together tutorials isn't what is needed. They want the beginners to be able to have a fair chance at good knowledge. Creating a site to slowly gain google juice over the next two years does nothing to help people today. Until w3schools stops showing up first for every "___ Tutorial" search in existence, the job of making it a notoriously questionable resource will do way more good than building a shadow site would do. If at least you are somewhat aware that you should fact check the things that you learn there.
I find it a little bit troublesome that the group that follows 'hacker' news is so willingly supportive of blatant technical misinformation. You can nitpick about some of the things that are brought up, but as a whole, it's ridiculous that the number one resource for technical information is so wildly out of touch with reality. You can question the method that this was brought up, but you should still have the desire to see good information in the wild.
And finally, yes, there are other out of date websites that have tutorials on them, but they don't show up first in google, and they don't sell certifications based on their misinformation to unknowing people who don't realize that the certifications mean absolutely nothing (and are potentially detrimental). Get mad at whoever you want, but objectively speaking, the site is a disservice to the community, regardless of it's ease. Getting bad information is _always_ easy.
Rather than creating a website to kvetch about the contents of one domain, I suggest you and your collaborators' time is better spent curating a set of resources that teach what you consider valid information that can be used by people wanting to get started in web development (it would also be far more beneficial to the web development community).
That one collaboratively edited directory of peer-reviewed resources would create a one-stop-shop for people looking for the best material on a specific topic or niche. By web developers for web developers.
Put those collection of related resources on MDC if you must (you say it's editable by anyone, so all your collaborators can participate at will, and have an aged and already authority-status starting point right on your doorstep).
One of the hardest things is to find resources for the beginner that teaches them high quality web development from scratch. Create a map for others and lead the way.
That I feel is a far more constructive approach than this angst-ridden site you've spawned. And it has a more immediate benefit of linking to existing and already indexed material on the web, and add/aggregate more authority.
A link from the zeldmans, heilmanns, sharps & blawsons and malarkey's of the web development community, and the reach they all have to a multitude of web developers can quickly give a high-quality curated resource a starting boost towards ranking the right material higher.
Since if all your collaborators are already heavily involved in creating web materials covering the subjects W3schools teaches, then there's already a set of authoritative sites existing. Those can all point to your master curation site, and consequently pass on existing google juice to those materials that exist and are fit for purpose.
Taking off W3schools from Google only promotes result number 2 up to the first place - is that really an improvement?
> I find it a little bit troublesome that the group that follows 'hacker' news is so willingly supportive of blatant technical misinformation.
I don't think anyone here is saying that W3Schools is tits, or that it disseminates valid tutorials or code.
I'm a little confused as to why W3Schools is being singled out among many crap tutorial sites. I know that you claim Google placement and bullshit certifications are your driving reasons, but I have a little trouble believing that.
The Internet is organic, and the very fact that W3Schools still exists today is more of an indicator that nothing better exists. W3Fools isn't webstandards.org and you're not Zeldman.
You've possibly wasted your time creating a site that ridicules rather than one that educates. Your site begs for applause from the knowing and shows up dead last for a user looking for quick tutorials.
> I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a lot longer than a week.
Most everyone would agree with that, but you gave yourself your own deadline, no? Who said W3Fools had to launch at a specific date? And why? W3Fools could have been called HitTheGroundRunning.org and started off with CSS3 or HTML5 tutorials. A month or so in and you'd have a real thoughtful and useful resource. Then scaled up based on user feedback.
I guess it's easier to hate and claim to be taking the high ground than it is to actually put forth an effort to make the state of things better-which says more about them than it does W3Schools, and probably says a lot about human nature in general, really.
W3Schools is not without its many and varied problems, both in content and, as others have said, its own code base, but so is nearly every other tutorial or web programming site on the internet that's more than, say, a year old. The 'net is litered with old content that often can be difficult for new developers to filter out and know what's good and what's not. Just look at the volume of old, horrible PHP tutorials floating around, or even old Rails code. The main difference is that a lot of people will see W3Schools and assume it is associated with the W3, so they might take it as being a more reliable source.
I'm not sure how actively W3Schools is updated, but if they have a staff maintaining it and actively develop and write content for the site and they're not replacing the old with the new, then yes, that's just lazy and they should be doing better, but tutorial sites containing old, bad code and coding practices is certainly nothing unique to W3Schools.