> "...Some folks have started voicing hostile opinions..."
A little late to the game, there.
This post ignores two important points:
1. There are a lot of much better sites out there (linked to from W3Fools, even). Selectively highlighting a single post is misleading.
2. W3Fools is not so much for the benefit of W3Schools, but for people who link to W3Schools as reference in blog posts, SO answers, etc. There are lots of great reference sites (MDN!) that provide much better material, but circumstances have given W3Schools a lot of GoogleFu. That needs to change.
#1: Where is one post highlighted? The article (lazily) acknowledges other competition, and you even quoted said acknowledgement.
#2: Yes, this point is ignored because it was not really the focus. The benefit you speak of can be realized without statements like "W3SCHOOLS IS TROUBLE" in big scary letters on W3Fool's homepage. The attitudes of the people involved and the clarity of their content are the focus of the article.
#1: Paragraph 3 - "...sometimes even dead silence..."
#2: OP misses the point of why there is so much hostility. If W3Schools was on page 3 for (chosen utterly at random)"getElementById" on Google, no one would care. Predictably, however, it's number 1. That's pretty dire - I would hope that the top results for common questions would be quality resources. Which W3Schools is not. There is a greater good here, which is not served by continuing to promote W3Schools the top developer resource.
#2: How is that w3schools fault that they are listed top of Google's search results? What do you expect them to do, somehow reduce their ranking? Surely it is the job of other sites to increase their ranking?
#1: You and I both know more examples are out there.
#2: getElementById returns developer.mozilla.org as the first result for me. Anyway, what about the point of why there is so much support? Convenience beats accuracy. I don't use W3Schools much now because I know of the inaccuracies, but I loved it as a beginner since not many sources I found were as intuitive as it.
A little late to the game, there.
This post ignores two important points:
1. There are a lot of much better sites out there (linked to from W3Fools, even). Selectively highlighting a single post is misleading.
2. W3Fools is not so much for the benefit of W3Schools, but for people who link to W3Schools as reference in blog posts, SO answers, etc. There are lots of great reference sites (MDN!) that provide much better material, but circumstances have given W3Schools a lot of GoogleFu. That needs to change.