Why I Love Snipplr

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Published in: CommentaryPosted by Tyler on 07/05/06

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Snipplr is incredibly useful to me. It’s become an integral part of my workflow over the last few months while I was developing it. But that’s not why I love it.

What makes Snipplr such a great site to work with is its audience. Previously, I ran the net’s largest Stephen King website. As you might imagine, that catered to a totally different demographic. While running that website I had to hold myself back and not do anything too crazy because I had to ensure that the website worked in Internet Explorer. Afterall, IE accounted for 85% of my traffic.

Snipplr, however, is totally skewed in the other direction. A quick look at the stats show that Internet Explorer is a measly 12% of our traffic. Firefox completely dominates. Even Safari is edging out the Big Blue E. This makes my life as a web designer / programmer so much easier. I can build Snipplr according to web standards and feel confident that it works in all the browsers that matter. Now that IE is the minority, I just don’t care any more. That’s not to say I won’t look for a fix if something is totally broken in the browser - I want Snipplr to be functional no matter how you choose to access it - but I’m not going to sweat over a few misplaced pixels here and there.

For those of you who enjoy building websites and are just as frustrated with Internet Explorer as I am, I invite you to dig around in the HTML of Snipplr. You’ll see that I’m using two stylesheets. One for Firefox and Safari, and then a secondary smaller one to fix the things that IE renders incorrectly. I think you’ll enjoy the name of that second stylesheet. First person to post it in the comments gets mad props.