Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.
Table of Contents
- An experiment
- Reasoning
Some time ago, I published my CSS Guidelines on
GitHub. These proved incredibly
popular, with thousands of stars, hundreds of forks, and a number of
translations. However—as often happens with these kinds of thing—they’re in need
of a little bit of spring clean.
I’m going to completely revisit, revise, overhaul, and rewrite the guidelines
into a comprehensive version 2.0.0. They will cover new things, they will change
old things, and they will be a lot, lot more thorough.
The guidelines will also become a lot more formal; they will have their own
dedicated domain, cssguidelin.es, and will be
properly, semantically versioned. This should help them remain more maintainable
and current.
Also, given that these things take a long time to put together, and contain a
lot of intellectual property, I’ve decided to monetise version 2.0.0, but
through a less traditional model…
An experiment
Having seen people like Radiohead
and Louis CK
experiment with pay what you
want models, I’ve decided
to try the same: CSS Guidelines will be free to all, available at
cssguidelin.es, but with a voluntary payment plan
(provided by Gumroad).
It will be very interesting to see how many people do pay (and how many do not).
Reasoning
I work for myself, my time is money, so taking time out to write these
guidelines is an opportunity cost. Further, sharing so much information may
actually impact whether someone would need to hire me or not—why get me on site
when I’ve written up such comprehensive guidelines?
But, that said, I genuinely do believe in the importance of sharing knowledge—I
would rather not have this information behind a solid pay wall. I also donate to
free and useful tools myself, as a thank you to the developer(s), and to try and
give some small incentive to maintain and stick with the project: I’m hoping
that other people do the same.
I’m going out on a limb here, it is a bit of gamble, but I’m hoping that people
who do get benefit from the guidelines will support them.
I have already started work on 2.0.0 which you can read (and
support) right now at
cssguidelin.es. You can get updates on the project and
its upcoming chapters by following
@cssguidelines.
Now, go get ’em!
