*cough*

And yes, Kyle, whuffie is a very silly word.

Eric’s earlier comments helped highlight the fact that such an undertaking isn’t a small one, so in that light I can understand why you’d not devote heavy resources to a rigorous update schedule when business realities indicated that it made more sense to concentrate elsewhere. I admit I easily divorce the reality of business costs associated with feature support in my head when I’m discussing these kinds of things.

I’m very glad to hear that the reference will be getting updates in the future, as it was a very valuable resource for me when I was starting out.

@Jeff – I still find whuffy to be a funny word.

Your points are well made, Kyle. The team here at SitePoint, as well as our amazing authors Tommy, Paul, Ian and James, worked tirelessly to assemble an up-to-date (at the time) reference site which, apart from a major redesign several months back, has sat largely unchanged since its launch. We’ll wear that.

The plan when we designed the SitePoint Reference was for the reader comments at the bottom of each page to bridge the gaps between updates to the site. Without sacrificing the editorial polish of the main content, we hoped, these reader comments would serve as a public errata/update list that we could periodically roll back into the reference.

Unfortunately, the SitePoint Reference didn’t generate the level of initial traffic (and, by extension, income) that we had hoped. The resources that would have normally gone into updating the Reference were therefore diverted to finding ways to generate additional traffic (like building our CodeBurner reference extension for Firebug), and to other more profitable pursuits. Reader comments like yours have contributed a certain amount of updated information to the site, but we’ve learned that authoritative-looking content like browser compatibility tables aren’t especially inviting to comments.

In a bizarre coincidence, the fix for the specific issue you raised (support for attribute selectors in IE7) went live on the Reference yesterday—mere hours before you published your comic and this blog post. It took much longer than it should have, but we finally got around to it. Another update—a clarification to the “HTML versus XHTML” page in light of the recent termination of the XHTML2 effort—is being deployed as I write this. So we have been making small updates here and there, but we could be doing a lot more.

When we exchanged tweets in April, the release of IE8 had just made it clear that the Reference needed a major update. At the time, our plan was to quickly update the compatibility tables for the latest browser releases, including FF3 and IE8. It seemed like something we could get done in a month, but competing priorities conspired against us. With FF3.5 and Opera 10 looming, we decided that the Reference as a whole needed a refresh to cover newly-implemented features of HTML5 and CSS3. As I write this, we are in the process of commissioning authors to make those updates, which we hope to publish in real time, putting up new content as the authors write it.

All this to say we know the SitePoint Reference isn’t the living document we had hoped it would be. Much of that comes down to business decisions we have made based on the level of traffic and income it has generated for us so far. We are working on ways to increase those so that we can justify devoting more resources to its maintenance, but in any case we are determined to conduct a wholesale refresh of the site’s content sometime this year (hopefully sooner rather than later).

I’m not sure why your comment was marked as “integrated into the reference” when it wasn’t; we might have to chalk that one up to human error, with our apologies.

The reason I bring up a wiki though is because we’ve seen the pattern before: Someone gets a passion to document support scores for a spec. It has a burst of popularity and the author starts to be considered an expert. Maybe the website author goes on to write books and speak at conferences and what happens :)

Of course the website becomes obsolete. It’s happened over and over again in little data silos all over the web for a decade. Eric’s pages, quirksmode, webdevout, Fyrd’s When Can I Use? This is not to blame anyone! It is simply the nature of the beast.

The beauty of putting the data into an open system is that when person A loses interest, person B can take over. The bad part of this is a loss of whuffy.

Jeff

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/openweb-group/msg/832e59bf5c5be898

@Jeff – A wiki is a neat idea, but…

@Eric Meyer – …I agree the major obstacle for a wiki is trust. There’s no reason to believe a wiki would be any more accurate (unless, I guess, it had high volume of obsessed editors that constantly are prowling the recent changes list). I’ll admit, though, that I thought about suggesting a “CSS Wiki” as a possible alternative to Sitepoint’s model.

My major beef is their failure to incorporate feedback as they indicated. Still, considering the level of upkeep such a resource requires, I’ll give them a bit of slack if they do get around to updating eventually (which I’m hoping is merely delayed and not canceled.)

Thank you for the link, Eric! It really helps put some great context on the challenges for such a project.

I’m not going to bust on SitePoint too much, because I can say from long and deep personal experience that creating and maintaining support information is really, really hard (see previous link). They probably deserve a few dings for not living up to their high-flown rhetorical promises, but they’re hardly alone in that either. How many times have we seen and heard big splashy announcements of sites and groups and resources that just fizzled out?