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Rebooting the reboot?
Have you heard the news? There are 2 reboot events scheduled for November 1st. Here's a basic rundown of how we got here:
- The original CSS Reboot, which had a round last May, was sold to a new owner.
- The new owner had some trouble getting the backend up for the new round, scheduled for November 1st.
- Some other guys in the webstandards community decided to put together their own new "Standards Reboot" as an alternative to the CSS Reboot.
- Apparently, CSS Reboot is now ready for November 1st, and Standards Reboot is not planning to change its course.
According to the guys behind Standards Reboot, they are not just pulling a "me-too" project for monetary gain. From their blog yesterday:
The site was designed with the intentions of continuing the idea of the reboot. The idea is bigger than any one person or site. CSS reboot was sold in June, ever since new owner has not been able to get their hands on a trusted rails developer. In the last two weeks the blog has been shut down, he no longer responds to emails and the gallery and reboot section of the site is full of mysql errors. There has been no word as to whether the cssreboot will still happen. Tell me why then should the last 3 or 4 yeas of the building up of this event suddenly go dark? We'll I for one don't think it should and born of that thinking is this site.
Yes, there are ads on the site and I/we appreciate any revenues that do come from those placements but I would like to assure members that I am not looking for financial gain with this site we are not trying to make a quick buck, that, I think was the eventual downfall of cssreboot I will not follow that same path. What you see here is what will always be. Money is not the top priority of this site.
Sounds reasonable, I guess, but one way or another we are now faced with the silly idea of having two indentical events in a community that already has enough duplication. We already have multiple design galleries with no distinction in subject matter that tend to cheapen the idea of "design inspiration," multiple aggregators for these design galleries, and multiple open-source design communities that compete for the largest share of users. Now we are faced with multiple reboot events that might just cheapen the idea of rebooting altogether.
I have to admit, at first I wasn't so concerned about the big picture here. I just thought, "2 reboots = who cares, same old free traffic." I was thinking to submit any site I redesigned during this month and not think twice about it. It wasn't until I spoke to Bryan and some of my other fellow 9rulers that I really gave it more thought. Bryan had a very good point; a reboot event should not just be about the quality of the code, but rather about an entire reinvigoration of a website. Looking at it from Bryan's perspective, it's entirely likely that young designers who are new to the whole reboot trend will never know what it was like to participate in the reboot when it was fresh. I can't imagine it will ever be like the May1stReboot either (warning: terrible Flash site), which seems to be what the very first CSS Reboot was based on.
What I am now convinced of, however, is that Bryan is 100% correct in saying that the reboot should not be just about the code. After all, if we really want to make standards-based web design mainstream, there's a good chance that segregating ourselves into our own little events is not a good idea. What if there was just one event for reboots, and everyone simply participated in that event? Wouldn't it be a great testament to the value of standards-based design to see some of our sites among the top winners? Wouldn't that be even more effective than just seeing the cream of standards-based design among, well, standards-based design? It would definitely have the helpful side-effect of solving the usual CSS Reboot problem, that of the CSS Reboot being flooded with sites that do not use standards-based code which only serve as spam. With the whole event being simply about the design, which is all anyone actually cares about since no one ever awards code quality, there's really no point in trying to encourage the use of standards. Not when you are giving away free links.
So my thinking is this: leave the gallery work to the galleries (especially those that actually do focus on quality code). I don't think I'll participate in any reboots this time around, since I don't think I like the idea of them at all. I'm perfectly OK with just launching my redesigns when they are done… and announcing them on launchfeed, just because.
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- Pingback: CSS e Standards Reboot - TomStardust.com on October 26, 2006
CSS Reboot is not cut out to be a platform for standard squeaky clean standard with no error or semantic downfall in sight. CSS Zen Garden provides the HTML and you can build the page with your own stylesheet plus it has to validate. I think CSS Zen is a much better concept. I had really a lot of fun with creating a Zen Garden Submission, step by step (here is what I came up so far: demo. I can never find the time to reboot on time. I have not finished the Zen submission, since I need to work on the colors and some cross-browser issues.
Johan: That design is hot stuff. Nice work.
I wanted to really sit down and think over my thoughts before writing a response, and instead of writing a entire entry here I posted one on the site
http://standardsreboot.com/view_article/7