The Day the Focus Died

For the past few years, I’ve been looking back at creative and business decisions I made, and wondering how wise they were. This is the story of one of those decisions. In 2008, A List Apart, for people who make websites reached its tenth year of independent publishing. Looking back on ten years of the magazine’s web standards advocacy, I decided it was time to broaden out ALA’s mission. It was time, in short, to take a more holistic approach to web design, covering all the skills required to create great usable web content and applications. If we failed to do this, I feared, we would stop leading the industry and turn into “merely the CSS trick of the week”—as I phrased my concern to the ALA staff. Here’s how I explained A List Apart’s change of direction on this very site: For most of its decade of publication, ALA has been the leading journal of standards-based web design. Initially a lonely voice in the desert, we taught CSS layout before browsers correctly supported it, and…