The snowball begins

Just after wrapping up my last post, I started looking around to see if any buzz about the WN launch had hit the Web yet. Ahem… I don’t think this one will sneak under too many radars. Jeffrey Zeldman just dedicated a huge amount of space to the redesign in today’s Daily Report. In a perfect answer to the “what’s the big deal?” questions I just asked, he writes:

“As a highly visible site with a long (and well-earned) reputation for deploying web technology well, Wired serves as a beacon to all developers. Its XHTML/CSS redesign will inspire other commercial sites to take the plunge…”

“…That’s how progress works. Indies take risks. Large, commercial sites take risks. Sooner or later, the market follows these leaders. The bigger the leader, the greater the impact, and the sooner what were once risks become norms. When your client, boss, or manager says, ‘We can’t do this,’ you can now reply, ‘Wired did it.‘”

After reading through Zeldman’s post, a congratulatory email from him dropped into my inbox. In addition to informing me of the Daily Report post I had just read, he also pointed out a new entry over at the Web Standards Project, referring to the redesign as a “Gutsy move for such a high-traffic site.” Jeffrey correctly reported that our site doesn’t validate [yet — I add — we’re working on that right now], but is quick to point out that validation is not the end-all, be-all.

While I completely agree with him, and am very proud of our accomplishment so far, we didn’t come all this way to let 13 stupid errors stand in our way of a perfectly valid XHTML document. Keep checking that validator url. Our team is hunting down and knocking off the errors as I type. It can be done. We know it can!