Though it has been a long time since I received anything truly worthwhile from them, I have somehow managed to remain subscribed to the Web Development Zone newsletter of TechRepublic.com. Its content has remained consistently unremarkable for at least the past year, which, I suppose, is why it has failed to attract enough attention for me to consider unsubscribing … until now.

The feature blog post in today's issue of the newsletter is Debug JavaScript with Mozilla's free debugger. At first glance, I assumed this must have been a typo, and that Mozilla had been falsely credited for Firebug, the excellent and free JavaScript debugger developed by Joe Hewitt and recently adopted by Yahoo!

But no! The article does in fact recommend in glowing and authoritative terms the obsolete Venkman debugger produced in the days before Firefox. Venkman has gone through long periods of stagnant development and incompatibility with current browser releases, and these days just barely runs under current browser versions (with documented problems).

It's one thing for a misguided novice to mention Venkman in a personal blog entry, but it's quite another for a site that bills itself as a reliable source of developer information to publish a lengthy article like this that will send beginners down the wrong track! As educators in the web development field, we have our hands full with all the old books and articles out there that still promote the wrong way of doing things—we don't need new articles from supposedly reputable sources further misleading beginners.

This is the comment I left on the story:

You can't be serious…

Venkman is an outdated piece of abandonware. If you can even get it to run in current versions of Mozilla and Firefox browsers, its behavior is buggy and its interface obtuse.

Firebug is the current JavaScript debugger of choice for the Mozilla stable of browsers.

In my view, publishing this sort of article is both careless and irresponsible. Beginners rely on this sort of article to learn the right way to do things, and by leading them astray you not only waste their time but make web development as a discipline less accessible to the masses.

This would be enough to make me finally unsubscribe from TechRepublic's newsletters, if I didn't feel compelled to keep an eye on them for future crimes against education.