The massive table of contents with words like "inheritance", "iterators" and "regular expressions" or the page with a hello world program and a button you can click to run it yourself?
I don't see any building, I just see a strange kind of entitlement mixed with a taste of blackmail.
Really, they're just bitching about the google rankings when you really think about it, because 'they know closures' or something to that effect.
w3schools is ranked highly because lots of people linked to it and it seems to have helped them in some way or other. If you feel that that ranking is not correct then maybe start your own search engine as well while you're at it?
Yes, you can gain a massive audience by telling lies people want to hear i.e. "I can teach you how to be a competent web developer!" They are still lies and they deserve criticism. There are extreme errors on that site that will break you for years and cause a lot of damage. They have a blatant SQL injection bug in their MySQL lesson, for example.
And "I don't see you doing any better" is schoolyard justice. An entry level site that's accurate and current is a fine idea. Someone should do it. That's irrelevant to this matter.
In grade school I learned that the country I live in can be represented on a flat map. That doesn't mean there aren't any levels of knowledge above grade school.
w3schools does not portend to be the 'be all end all' of knowledge about the web or developing on the web. They're just another resource and they probably serve their intended purpose a very large number of the times.
Example code usually does not come with guarantees of correctness or even applicability to your problem. It just shows you the basics. It's the cut-and-paste mentality that causes such samples to be used in production code and that's a real problem, but that problem does not lie with the source of the information.
A MySQL lesson that shows you the basics is explicitly not going to go in to details like prepared statements, sql injection and prevention and so on.
Just like you don't teach physics to a kid that you're teaching to walk.
If you're using w3schools as a source for cut-and-paste examples or even best practices then you're doing it wrong, think of it as the 'grade school' of web development. Good enough to get your feet wet, not good enough to build an enterprise grade web application.
