Remember our League of (web) Justice?
Well, I'm pleased to announce we have recruited another superhero into our league: Doctype.
Doctype is a free question and answer site for web designers. You can get fast solutions to your CSS, HTML, web design and email design problems. For each question, Doctype can generate screenshots of your design on any browser or email client. This makes it much easier for other people to see the problem and help you fix it.
Doctype was inspired by Stack Overflow, but it was custom-built and tailored to the needs of web designers by the fine folks at Litmus. Litmus is a tool designed to show how your HTML and CSS will render in a variety of different browsers and email clients, so naturally Doctype supports Litmus integration. When you ask those gnarly design questions, in addition to posting raw HTML and CSS, you can also post a set of automatically generated screenshots illustrating the design problem.
Being "inspired by" Stack Overflow, the site also borrows generously from our concepts of reputation, tagging, and markup -- but with their own decidedly designer-ish bent.
While we certainly encourage web design questions involving HTML and CSS on Stack Overflow, it's intended first and foremost for programmers. So if you're a web designer, and less of a programmer, you might find a better audience for your question (plus some cool auto-screenshot capabilities) at Doctype.
What does this mean in practical terms?
- Our /faq will direct designers with pure HTML/CSS web design questions to Doctype, to better serve this subset of our audience.
- Our “hero roster” at the bottom of every page will officially list doctype.com as a member of the team.
- We will host Doctype discussion on meta, so the Doctype developers can participate and respond to community reactions and feedback for their site.
While this is a looser, less direct partnership than the one with How-To Geek, it does align well with our core Q&A; format. By combining forces with How-To Geek and DocType, we're creating an even stronger Justice League on the web. All the better to serve our central mission: getting the best possible answers to your questions. Whatever those questions happen to be.