My most popular article on the Web Freitag, 03. November 2006, 02:16:22
My article Doctype switching and standards compliance: An overview has been on the Web for a good long time. I think I wrote it in 2002 (unfortunately I didn't keep an update history) and updated it a few times to document changes in Mozilla and Opera. The article was quite popular at the time, mainly because the Doctype Switch was not very well documented, and my humble article served as documentation for a great many people. As far as I remember, it was even referenced in a few books.
The amazing thing is: After all this time, people still keep reading and bookmarking it. For example, several people over at ma.gnolia.com bookmarked the article in the last year. And I keep finding blogs that mention it, not to mention being plagiarized by the BBC (I'll have to contact the editor once again. I think he's taking me for a fool).
I love it, of course. It's wonderful to see that the article is stil useful. And you know what? I wrote it for myself. Because I wanted, once and for all, to know exactly how this fucking bloody complicated thing worked. So it was a typical self-help article. I think I should write more of those.
The other articles, both English and German, were quite popular too; I wrote extensively about CSS for a while and that landed me a deal with O'Reilly to do the expert review for Eric Meyer's "CSS Pocket Reference". And the article Return of the 'best viewed with' parochialism got me an invitation from the Web Standards Project to join them.
So I guess my writing isn't all bad. Now I just need to find a way to monetize it. Any takers?
Addendum: I just realized that my Doctype article is even referenced in the English and German Wikipedia: Document Type Definition and DTD. And Heise did me, too: Doctype-Switching: Wie Browser über die Darstellung von (X)HTML entscheiden. I'm even mentioned in Webreference.com: Using the DOCTYPE Tag. Even the Mac Edition mentioned the Doctype article. And an University. A Swiss programmer. A Web Developer community I've never heard of. A Tutorial Website. Even the Russians (I'm guessing this is russian) are linking to the article. And Microsoft uses my ancient (2001) Colour My Forms article as a testbed for IE7! Fame at last!