Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

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Warning: unusual opinions sliding into a full fledged rant.

I know it is cool to hate w3schools and I don't use it personally, but seriously, can we get over ourselves here?

The reason why w3schools rank highly and have done for years is because for a large segment of users it works.

And as someone else has pointed out the official documentation is often atrocious: both Python and Java online docs are close to worthless if you have a decent ide that shows you method signatures.

PHP docs used to be a lot better in that they described what was going on and why and had comment sections that I imagine they also used as feedback to improve the docs.

I haven't used PHP or Python for years but today there is Spring docs to drive me mad: telling me all the things I know and not telling me anything about how to interpret a Spring project.

Spring is infinitely flexible and there are more ways to configure Spring than there are Spring programmers since most of them can't even configure two projects the same way ;-)

Not in regards to W3Schools, but in regards to docs in general: i've found those of PHP to be excellent for one simple reason (regardless of what i think of the language).

They have user comments, which oftentimes contain the information and examples that are actually very important in day to day usage, as opposed to a cut and dry description by the language authors.

For example, go to this page and scroll down to "User Contributed Notes": https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php

To me, it feels like most of the technologies out there could benefit from user source and user voted content at the bottom of pages like this, the one thing that IDEs also don't provide (though if one were to throw in some fuzzy search from, say, StackOverflow, we could probably get context surrounding a particular bit of code).

Of all the spammy sites, w3schools is the least of my problems. I still find a use out of it when I need some very superficial information about, say, an HTML tag.

My hate for W3Schools comes from the low quality of the content and the impression I get that their high ranking is only the result of SEO hacking. I respect the fact that there's a lot of _poor_ official documentation. But let's not supplant that with different _poor_ documentation.

The content is not low quality. It used to be pretty bad like 10 years ago but no more. I prefer W3Schools to MDN.

I find W3Schools fine for most use cases. What would you suggest as being a better resource?

I can't speak for Java's docs, but Python's have good examples in the documentation that are not present in an IDE's tooltips. Further, there's often a handy link to the source code of the module.

Thinking back, yes it is probably true what you write about Python docs, the problem is you easily end up in the wrong docs when searching for something.

I'm not sure why that's happening to you. Perhaps you're being misled by some SEO to click on pages that are sites trying to put advertisements in front of you?

Not the same but I admit my explanation might not be the best.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927092 for a more descriptive example.

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