Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

What the heck IS w3schools? i.e who is behind it, where did it come from, where is it going?

It's always there and seemingly always BEEN there, and it always comes up in my search results and indeed I often use it and the info seems pretty good.

But apart from that, how can something so well used basically fly under the radar?

View on HN

As one comment under said, it's a small Norwegian family company (5 employees) that's been around since at least 1998. And they've always focused on what they do.

From open Norwegian business data (https://www.proff.no/selskap/refsnes-data-as/sandnes/it-kons...), it seems like they have a yearly revenue around $4.5M USD. From the annual salary expenses, those five employees either make bank - or they hire a lot of consultants from overseas.

So I guess it's a good example of first-mover advantage.

Most people seem to think w3schools has some form of association with the W3C. It is actually run by a small family company, Refsnes Data AS, from Sandnes, a depressing city on the western coast of Norway.

Perhaps what the world needs is more depressing cities then...

It's how I learned web development 20 something years ago. They have simple, clear, entry level tutorials on HTML, CSS, JS and a number of other languages that give you enough to become somewhat productive on the web, so you can be interested in deeper content. It's an institution.

I downloaded the W3Schools offline dump zip archive, which was under 50mb IIRC, from a friend when I first started learning programming because I didn't have access to proper internet. That helped me a lot to learn to code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com