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The state of QuirksMode.org

As I promised a month ago, I have finally added the QuirksBlog to my site. It'll serve as my personal blog, not only for announcing new pages on this site and articles on other sites, but also for commenting on the web developers' world in general. In addition to this proud announcement, I'd like to give a general overview of where QuirksMode.org currently stands.

I took advantage of the Christmas holidays to launch QuirksBlog, not only because it was the first opportunity I had for adding the finishing touches to the system, but also because it's rather quiet on the Net in these days, allowing me to calmly test my new setup. The QuirksBlog, like the Bug Report, runs on the Movable Type publishing platform. Although QuirksBlog is a standard blog, the Bug Report definitely isn't, and I will discuss it in more detail in a future entry.

Meanwhile, QuirksMode.org remains one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities. QuirksMode.org is only fourteen months old, but its predecessors trace their pedigree right back the Browser Wars era, when in 1998 I started a simple JavaScript Section to help myself and other web developers make sense out of Netscape 4 and Explorer 4. Although I'm not much given to self-congratulation I must admit I'm very proud of the work of my hands.

During these six years I have been immensely helped and comforted by all sorts of support, ranging from mentions on prestigious sites to the gentle flow of Thank You mails from budding web developers who are very happy to discover a site that explains not only problems and difficulties of CSS and JavaScript, but also the underlying ideas and theories, in a simple way. I have a knack for simple explanations; see the rest of this site for ample evidence.

On the more material side, when I calculated my overall income for this year, I was astonished to find that no less than 40 % of it derives from people and companies who have discovered me through this site! This means that QuirksMode.org now effectively pays for itself, and that I can invest substantial sums of money in it (for instance, to set up the Bug Report). This is a very welcome development, and it proves that the (now alas disappeared) page that praised this site as a paragon of "passive marketing" was completely right.

Nonetheless, faithful readers may have noticed that I haven't added a lot of pages to QuirksMode.org since its creation. This is partly because during the making of this site I created quite a few new pages, partly because I had a lot more paid work in 2004 and hence a lot less time, and partly because my own focus is changing.

Where, up until 2002, I was mainly concerned with documenting endless amounts of browser oddities, bugs and best practices, during the past two years I have become increasingly interested in the underlying theory. How should we develop web sites? What is the "best way" to write JavaScripts? What are the exact relations between XHTML, CSS and JavaScript? Up until May of this year I had an outlet for such musings in my Keep it Simple column, but since its demise I haven't published any theoretical articles and few technical ones. This blog is going to change that, I hope.

Finally, to everyone who has supported me over the past six years: Thank you!

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