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Comment by michaelleland | Hacker News Reader

Where do HTML/CSS fall? Are they unimportant or so important that they are considered obvious?

I've yet to find any good, modern, sources of learning HTML and CSS. No one should follow this to the word, so that learning would happen in phase 2.

Also, if you're learning Ruby, Python, and eventually JS you're going to have to pick up HTML and CSS on the side.

http://w3schools.com/ does a good job of providing tools and tutorials for picking up HTML, CSS and a host of other technologies.

Sites like that tend to mislead you by dancing around the biggest most important aspect of browser compatibility.

HTML and CSS so perfect and beautiful, right until the point where your website looks like it's melted in Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or IE.

There are some HTML and CSS cookbooks that do all right, but it's borderline impossible to get a grasp over the whole thing.

w3schools is the single worst 'developer' site on the entire web. The very worst. If there was a single site I would have delisted from google, purged from caches, and it's maintainer burned at the stake, this is it. I'd settle for him just having his PageRank taken out back and shot.

It's composed entirely of mangled versions of ancient official documentation, corrupted with hearsay, riddled with content-styled ads, and scummily trading on the name of the bureaucrats that attempt to be authoritative on the whole mess. Every single example he provides manages to be a horrifying implementation of 'worst practice'.

http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html is the browser reference you want.

For backend stuff, go to the upstream developers, not some bullshit artist that's manage to paraphrase and SEO his way to being king of the shitpile.

I suppose I'll risk further downvoting and respond here. I don't disagree with any particular point you've made except one: it isn't a developer site.

A developer (read anyone with sufficient technical background and experience to actually write code) doesn't need or want the kind of shit that site is peddling. But for someone with zero technical background the site actually does a pretty good job of providing enough of an introduction for someone to get a toehold on the material.

Half of that site is ads and promotions, it's also terribly detail lite and lacks some browser spec stuff.

Also, very few common/good practice parts.

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