StackOverflow for HTML and CSS

by whalesalad • 17 years ago

57 45 17 years ago

naz• 17 years ago

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

phsr• 17 years ago

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??

pbz2• 17 years ago

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

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

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.

whalesalad3• 17 years ago

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).

nsoonhui• 17 years ago

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

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

mrshoe• 17 years ago

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. :)

andreyf• 17 years ago

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.

webwright• 17 years ago

"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?

forgotmypasswd• 17 years ago

My question got answered in 4 minutes. I cant complain

rudd• 17 years ago

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.

triffid• 17 years ago

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.

phenwoods• 17 years ago

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?

cscotta• 17 years ago

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."

whalesalad3• 17 years ago

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

jmillikin• 17 years ago

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.

kolya3• 17 years ago

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.

blasdel3• 17 years ago

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.

jeroen• 17 years ago

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

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

Their focus isn't web design.

blasdel3• 17 years ago

stackoverflow doesn't claim to be XHTML

adamhowell4• 17 years ago

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.

llimllib• 17 years ago

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.

staunch2• 17 years ago

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.

j_b_f• 17 years ago

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

brown9-22• 17 years ago

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

Feels incredibly... derivative. Coattails-riding.

philfreo• 17 years ago

Where? I only see the footer link

adamhowell4• 17 years ago

I could write this thing in a weekend.

(Forgive me, could no longer resist.)

Pistos22• 17 years ago

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

adamhowell4• 17 years ago

Pistos1 would've realized it was a joke.

jes5199• 17 years ago

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.

StackOverflow for HTML and CSS

Related Stories