W3Schools is great because it covers everything, in an approachable manner. For the one occasion a year I use XPath, W3Schools has a nice refresher and function reference.
Sure, the information may be imprecise or just plain wrong, but we have to remember that this is for absolute beginners. Merely having errors does not make w3schools worthless, and a lack of errors does not make alternatives better.
The material on W3Schools is split into bite-sized chunks, along with numerous examples, references, quizzes, try it yourself areas... None of the alternatives suggested are this well organized.
Just think what kind of HTML tutorial could have been created with the time and effort it took to build w3fools.com.
"Sure, the information may be imprecise or just plain wrong, but we have to remember that this is for absolute beginners. Merely having errors does not make w3schools worthless, and a lack of errors does not make alternatives better."
This is the biggest problem. When you're an absolute beginner, you don't know what's right and what's wrong, and if wrong things are being presented in the middle of right things, it's impossible to discern the difference. Accuracy should be of the utmost concern for people who are providing information to people who are at the beginning of their learning journey.
"Just think what kind of HTML tutorial could have been created with the time and effort it took to build w3fools.com."
Not a very good one. w3fools came together in about a week of on-and-off collaboration after several months of having an etherpad where people were dumping errors they came across. The effort to create a comprehensive HTML tutorial and then position it in a place where it could counter w3schools is many orders of magnitude larger.
How is "numerous examples, references, quizzes, try it yourself areas" even worth anything if said examples, references, quizzes and so forth are... incorrect?
It's like saying, "Well, at least we have textbooks! Too bad half of them say the world is only 6,000 years old, but hey! No body's written a better text book than this yet!"
And how is it decent as a refresher and function reference, if it's just refreshing fallacies? Try using something that's actually accurate. In fact, MDC has a pretty decent xpath section: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/xpath
pretty clearly show why W3Schools is capturing so much beginner mindshare.
From 1), it's trivially clear where to start: the link is labeled "Start Learning XPath Now!", and even if you skip that, below there's a linear list of topics. When and if I do click on the "start" link (or the first item in the ToC), I'm greeted with what is very clearly the first part of a walkthrough. Going through the sections, it's all pretty clearly marked, chunked up into easily digestible pieces, etc. Perfect for a first glance through the topic, even though I'll definitely admit that in general W3Schools content leaves something to be desired.
Conversely, from 2), the Mozilla.org page, it's pretty difficult to figure out where I want to be clicking, assuming I know nothing. After I discard the "tools" section as probably irrelevant to learning from scratch about this, I'm left with the "Documentation" column. So far, so good.
The first item in that list says "Introduction to using XPath in JavaScript", which still sounds pretty good, except wait! At the top of the page, it says that XPath is primarily used with XSLT, but this tutorial gives an intro to XPath without XSLT, so that can't be right...why would the special case that doesn't match what people usually use this for be the first item in the documentation list?
And yikes, those other links don't really look like introductions to XPath, either, they look like special topics about XPath. The last link (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/08/holman/) is probably the closest to what a beginner might want, but it's a lot of material, not the ~10 minute introduction to the topic that we'd really be looking for.
It's alright, though. If we poke around at the "Using XPath" link (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_XPath), we find that "Mozilla" (yeah, I'm aware that's a wiki, but you know what I mean...) has a suggestion as to where to go to learn more:
This article does not attempt teach XPath itself. If you're unfamiliar with this technology, please refer to W3Schools XPath tutorial.
> Sure, the information may be imprecise or just plain wrong, but we have to remember that this is for absolute beginners. Merely having errors does not make w3schools worthless, and a lack of errors does not make alternatives better.
By letting beginners learn most stuff the wrong way, you're not helping anyone, and you put them behind in knowledge that is actually usable and good practice.
> The material on W3Schools is split into bite-sized chunks, along with numerous examples, references, quizzes, try it yourself areas... None of the alternatives suggested are this well organized.
Well organized misinformation is still a bad resource.
Sure, the information may be imprecise or just plain wrong, but we have to remember that this is for absolute beginners. Merely having errors does not make w3schools worthless, and a lack of errors does not make alternatives better.
The material on W3Schools is split into bite-sized chunks, along with numerous examples, references, quizzes, try it yourself areas... None of the alternatives suggested are this well organized.
Just think what kind of HTML tutorial could have been created with the time and effort it took to build w3fools.com.