Where to find reliable information

- [Instructor] We have access to more information than ever before and more tools for searching and finding information than ever before. But finding the right information and verifying the accuracy of that information is still very much left up to us as individuals. This can be challenging especially if you're working in an environment where things change all the time, like the web. Using myself as an example, much of what I learned when I got started building websites back in the late 1990s is, today, either irrelevant, or non-functional, or just plain wrong. Yet, all that information is still available on the web, if you go looking for it. And it gets more complicated, when standards change as rapidly as they do on the web, it's difficult for anyone to keep up. So, there's often a significant lag between when a new feature, or method, or best practice becomes available and when people start using and documenting it, so reliable information gets to those searching for it. Part of becoming a practitioner, or professional in any field is learning how to find the right information at the right time. And being able to verify that information when you find it. This requires a good understanding of how the relevant community or industry is structured, who makes decisions, how are those decisions communicated to the community, how is information shared, by whom, and what type of verification process is in place to ensure information is accurate? For the web, we can sketch out a sort of pyramid structure to describe these relationships. At the top is the W3C, which defines the standard for HTML, CSS and the web platform, and TC39, which defines the standard for ECMAScript, which is implemented as JavaScript. Next, come the platform resources. These are sites and services managed by the platform vendors to provide the most up-to-date information about standard implementations. Below that are the status monitors, these are services providing statistical information about how standards are implemented and used. And at the bottom we find the community resources. These are people like you and me who work in the industry and share our knowledge with our peers. In this pyramid, the accuracy and authoritativeness of the information increases the higher up you go. And the volume of available information and practical implementation examples increases the lower down you go. The trick is to figure out where to look in the pyramid. Or, if you already have information in front of you, where that information is positioned in the pyramid. Follow along in this course, and we'll figure that out together.