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Dear Prof. X,

I have serious concerns with some of the material that you covered in class in regards to browser sniffing and the use of http://www.w3schools.com/ as a reference guide.

Browser Sniffing

While there are occasions on the edge where browser sniffing may be necessary this is almost never the case when first starting out.  I disagree that browser sniffing should be used as a means of determining functionality and so do a lot of other developers in the industry.

http://ryanmorr.com/archives/brower-detection-necessary-or-negligent
http://jibbering.com/faq/notes/detect-browser/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Web_development/Writing_forward-compatible_websites
http://ejohn.org/blog/future-proofing-javascript-libraries/

The post by John Resig, the creator of jQuery, was written almost 5 years ago.  The idea of browser sniffing being inadequate in the modern web is not a new idea.  This has been established by the web development community; browser sniffing is bad, feature detection and progressive enhancement is good.  It was also neglected to mention that the User Agent string can be manipulated by the user and is to be considered unsafe.

w3schools.com

I can certainly understand why w3schools would be a list of reference material.  It is likely a top-hit on your reference searches and is likely the same for students.  At one point I used them to learn about HTML.  However, there are vastly superior reference material out there from trusted sources directly affiliated with the creation of the language or browser rendering.  I value and respect these reference materials far more than I would w3schools.com; who ultimately has a motive of making money off of me from advertisements.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/1-introduction-to-the-web-standards-cur/#toc
http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/html-css-javascript/
http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs

I hope that the course continues to provide useful information, however I feel it is necessary as a member of the web development community to point this information out.  I highly value my time spent in school and wish to get the most bang for my buck, so to speak.  I want to see the right information taught in classes, I don't think encouraging browser sniffing or referencing bad information is accomplishing that.

Sincerely,

Charles Sprayberry