StackOverflow for HTML and CSS | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow for HTML and CSS

doctype.com

57 pointswhalesalad45 comments

Really wish this site would bill itself as "Web Development Q&A" instead of "Web Design."

Of the three pages of questions currently on the site, none of them would be better described as "design" than "frontend development."

It's time we granted these separate professions the dignity of their own names instead of forcing everything into the hodgepodge of "design."

I couldn't agree more. Sorry for lack of a more fruitful comment, but really, you said it perfectly.

Stackoverflow is already geared toward and full of css and HTML questions. What gap is this site trying to fill?

My thoughts exactly, and it also looks like they may have some bugs to fix like here: http://doctype.com/why-floating-elements-being-pushed-around

Notice how the image covers the right hand nav??

That's what you get for not using tables :)

No, that's what you get for not preparing yourself for all the different shapes and sizes of user created content.

You can't prepare yourself for all the sizes and shapes created by the user. The minute you give up control of content you will end up with crap that like. If he had used tables at least the layout would have adjusted accordingly. It would not have looked pretty, but it would've been usable.

Well, for one you don't need Openid to register. Stack overflow scares a lot of potential users. It is more geared towards programmers as opposed to designers.

Yeah.. openid still feels really funny to me even as a developer. I guess I should read up more on how it actually works (behind the scenes).

Screw it. I've implemented it many times and still don't prefer it myself. I like to be able to setup a new separate semi-anonymous account on each site I use.

Yep, I feel the same way. I'm much more a fan of something like clickpass where I can bootstrap my signup with details already filled in.

I still haven't bothered to signup for Stackoverflow because of the OpenID requirement. If it has username/password it'd be done already.

Great news, myopenid is part of stackoverflow. Register with myopenid and use that to get into stackoverflow.

Okay, myopenid is really an independent entity, but just pretend they are part of the same company and it'll work out fine.

I too am not a huge fan of current implementation of OpenID. However, if you have a throwaway account on Yahoo or Google, it is trivially easy to signup on Stackoverflow.

If that's what you like then can't you just create a separate semi-anonymous openid for every site you use?

I prefer OpenID, and the lack of one stopped me from registering.

You can always provide options ( with/ without OpenID) for registration

The cynic in me sees two differences:

1) Much smaller user base

2) The Litmus ad on the right side of every page

EDIT: The rest of me sees healthy competition and an interesting take on freemium marketing for their money-making app. :)

Much smaller user base

Since SO content is licensed under creative commons, there's no reason they can't feed in all questions into SO... I suppose it might be tricky to merge votes of the (much larger) SO audience with votes of their audience, and has interesting implications to SO's business, but it's certainly doable.

"1) Much smaller user base"

Also a much more focused user base. From an advertising point of view, do you think it's easier to sell 10,000 uniques on a general web technology site or 5,000 uniques on a site that has a very specific audience like web designers?

That's a pretty astute point.

I can see them sharing the same database for both sites but displaying the CSS/HTML questions both on doctype and SO, but doctype restricted to CSS/HTML only. This will allow them to get content through multiple channels but allow them to sell more targeted ads on doctype.

I would argue that the SO userbase is already highly focused - on developers. Its not "general technology site", just "general developers" site. Its not as if that's an especially large and poorly defined group.

With a much smaller subset of potential users I think you'll also find a much more "focused" group of advertisers, i.e. a smaller group of interested advertisers.

My question got answered in 4 minutes. I cant complain

Not exactly a gap. It's just trying to be a domain-specific site. There're plenty of examples of this. For example, you could view HN as a domain-specific digg or reddit, for tech/startups. Even though you can make a subreddit or similar.

Perhaps they felt there was a lot of bad quality for HTML/CSS question and answers on StackOverflow, so they built this. I don't think so, but it's possible that the creators do.

I think there are a lot of poor HTML/CSS questions and answers on Stack Overflow, but I don't think separating them other programming questions and from non-front-end programmers is really going to help anyone.

From the Stackoverflow blog http://blog.stackoverflow.com, this is an official sister site of Stackoverflow.

Will this mean that HTML/CSS questions will be migrated from Stackoverflow?

One point: people here seem to be assuming they want to sell the ad space on the right hand side of the page.

Rather, I suspect that the whole site is an advertisement for their services. If they're successful, they'll gather huge amounts of google juice (for good reason, with useful links).

Further, I suggest that people should view this as good, organic marketing, rather than as some sort of evil practice because their intent is to market. There should be lots more marketing like this.

I've become convinced that CSS is an elaborate trick played upon graphics designers; It's an impressively inappropriate tool for laying out text, but given a few hundred hours of trial and error, you can make anything almost work. I think it's telling that no UI toolkit uses anything that remotely resembles the HTML box model.

These sites are 90% SEO focused (even if they don't admit that it's true). I wonder if it's better to separate it all out on these different sites. They have to build up PageRank on each one separately. It seems risky, although it probably will benefit them in the long run because they'll effectively compete with themselves.

On the StackOverflow podcast Jeff & Joel frequently discuss their goal to get ranked highly on popular search engines.

Doesn't validate: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdoctype.com%2...

text/html MIME-type on XHTML markup

Seems like a great start to a site dedicated to web design.

What would validation prove? These guys created a website so you can talk to experts on web design. They are not claiming to be experts on that topic themselves. Even if validation meant much it would seem unfair to hold the owners of this site responsible.

Validation would prove that they knew what it meant to paste this at the top of their template:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

If they actually served the pages with the correct Content-Type, their pages would not render in any browser.

If they actually served the pages with the correct Content-Type, their pages would not render in any browser.

You mean it wouldn't render in IE. In any more reasonable browser, if there were any parsing errors in the XHTML then you would get a big fat error message but otherwise it would render just fine.

But who cares! it's all about HTML 5 now, baby!

No, it wouldn't render in any XHTML-supporting browser. You'll get the error message instead of the page.

Yes, WebKit apparently renders the page up to the error.

http://realtech.burningbird.net/archive/200905?page=2

I could have been a bit more specific in my earlier comment as I include Firefox in the group of reasonable browsers, even though with it, you get the YSOD. I know a lot of people swear by Opera, but I don't use it, so won't include it in my reasonable browsers list purely for subjective reasons.

Though as I said, what does it matter now that XHTML 2 has been canned.

Neither does stackoverflow ( http://vldtr.com/?key=SO ). Didn't stop them.

Their focus isn't web design.

stackoverflow doesn't claim to be XHTML

2003 called, it wants it "I spent the least amount of time I possibly could to come up with a just barely relevant criticism" back.

The string "stack overflow" is found about 5 times on the front page.

Feels incredibly... derivative. Coattails-riding.

Where? I only see the footer link

I could write this thing in a weekend.

(Forgive me, could no longer resist.)

A good rebuttle to that general notion: http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-ha...

Pistos1 would've realized it was a joke.

My bad. :)

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