[Phemist]

w3schools is a for-profit company that survives on its schooling business. Its incentives are mis-aligned with mine: When I search for information on something web-dev related, I want it to be short & to the point. For w3schools, to maximize paid lesson uptake, it needs to only superficially explain what I want to know, enough to leave me confused and willing to pay for lessons.

That is even assuming w3schools has accurate information, which historically they did not, and there is no reason why they will not lapse in this regard in the future.

MDN has better aligned incentives on other hand, if I can find the information I need quickly, then I can developer faster and higher quality websites, which in turn in the aggregate will benefit the participants in MDN who are incentivized to increase their respective browser penetration (etc., I don't want to get into a whole discussion here).

At some point you come to a level where approximately 0% of the w3schools pages contain the information you need, but 100% of the MDN pages. So.. why have the overhead of w3schools results? Also, why develop bad habits early on?

[cubefox]

I'd say w3schools is actually much better for beginners than MDN. If you learn HTML, CSS or JavaScript, MDN will often include too much unimportant information. (Similar to how Wikipedia math articles are often inscrutable for beginners because they are littered with lots of advanced low-importance information.) Additionally, w3schools has more easy "try it" examples which MDN consideres too trivial to bother with.

I agree though that MDN is much better than w3schools for non-beginners.