Anyone else tired of w3schools?

Posted on 11th of July 2008

… and the mediocre content they provide? I’m especially tired of the high ranking they (still) get in google. I go to hit google with “PlaceHolder asp.net”, and w3schools is the second hit. If you go read their page it has barely 3 lines regarding this control (highlighted with red outline), the remaining details are simply aggregate data, or advertising (outlined with green, doesn’t include all the further ads you’d see if you had scrolled down).

w3schools webpage screenshot
w3schools “3 lines of documentation” regarding the ASP.NET PlaceHolder class.

I mean, this is a total joke. When did w3schools start out? 2000? They became popular with their concise CSS properties listings back in the day. But seriously, it’s like this site is frozen in time. Their CSS reference point is 2.0 from 1998 (not that a mere properties reference would list much different from 2.0 and 2.1, but there are some minor additions.) I would prefer they would work on updating their CSS reference instead of wasting time on ASP.NET.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 1:32 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Anyone else tired of w3schools?”

  1. Kostas Says:
    July 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

    Valid point, and glad to see svendtofte.com with fresh content. Did you forget to mention who you’d prefer to have top google ranking on the subject for e.g. css?

    PlaceHolder asp.net -site:w3schools.com

  2. svendtofte Says:
    July 14th, 2008 at 12:02 am

    Actually, I spent about 30 or 60 mins trying to find what would have been preferable. The old “gold standard” (westciv) seems to have moved over to a “for pay” content model. Another old favorite site of mine, ZVON also seems to have stagnated (well, no real new content added since 2005, and ZVON was always more XML oriented, not having a focus on CSS). The best looking reference I found was probably sitepoint. Just looking at the height entry shows good content.

    Now obviously neither westciv, ZVON or sitepoint are very simple “listings”, and there’s great value to a very simple and sparse listing, but it does seem like there’s some potential for something better in w3schools’s place.

  3. James Says:
    July 11th, 2010 at 1:58 pm

    W3Schools will never light a candle to BigNoseBird!

  4. ric Says:
    August 18th, 2011 at 7:07 pm

    i would also like to hear about a substitute to w3schools.

    BigNoseBird looks like something published in 1998. it is not invitable.

    although w3schools might have somewhat outdated content (not allot though, as i’ve found in my visits) i continually submit erratas to their code and i still continue to use them allot because of their easy to use website, and vast content.

    regards

  5. w3s Says:
    June 19th, 2012 at 4:01 pm

    Wonderful work! This is the type of information that are supposed to be shared around the web. Shame on Google for not positioning this publish higher! Come on over and visit my web site . Thank you =)

  6. Carl-Erik Says:
    October 3rd, 2012 at 11:02 am

    Which is probably why stuff like this appeared: http://www.google.no/search?q=w3fools :-D Good page on Curried Functions in Javascript, btw!

  7. blogtv Says:
    May 11th, 2013 at 4:57 pm

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