Well I decided it wouldn’t be much help as a portfolio is really what people ask me of. Like, my friend told me to apply for a job at his company opening up on the 4th of January, and he asked for my portfolio only (resume too of course).
It will be quite good money if I actually get it :).
For two ordinary guys running a web site (and badly failing to keep it up to date) the w3schools site certainly gets way more attention than it deserves.
There are hundreds if not thousands of much better sites out there on each and every one of the subjects that the w3schools site covers and many of the alternatives are way more up to date. In some instances the alternatives are run by companies rather than just a couple of guys as a hobby and so those other sites actually employ people to keep them up to date. That makes them far more useful sites than ones such as w3schools that are really small time operations.
Perhaps one or both of the two guys who run w3schools have lost interest in that hobby and that is why so much of the info there is now so far out of date.
I personally recommend http://webdesign.about.com as a far better resource for HTML and CSS and being able to pass the tests there actually means that you know the subject. Since About.com is run by the New York Times and w3schools is run by two nobodies it’s fairly obvious which is more likely to have some meaning.
The tests at webdesign.about.com don’t pretend to be certifications since there is no connection to any official body to make them that meaningful - there is even less connection with respect to the tests at w3schools and so the w3schools tests are even less able to be considered certifications than those from anywhere else. We could each place an HTML test on our web sites and they’d be as meaningful as certifications as the w3schools tests.