14 DAY TRIAL // On August 11, Salted Services Ltd., owner of the famous online browser compatibility testing tool Litmus, revealed its new service called Doctype. This is a community-based question and answer website, dealing only with web-design related issues.
Doctype is a strictly membership community, an account being required to ask, answer or vote questions. The registration process is very fast, email confirmation being necessary to access the new account. After logging in, any user can ask or answer questions freely, about any HTML and CSS-related topic.
The website concentrates only on web and email design code writing-related questions, focusing on the domain of expertise that Litmus is renowned for. Some of the unique features found in the Litmus online testing tools are incorporated in the Doctype question submission system.
After filling in the question title and problem details, the user can optionally fill in the URL of the problematic website, select from two drop-down lists a browser version that renders the website with the reported problem, and select a browser version that displays the website correctly.
After submitting the question, Doctype automatically generates screenshots of the problem and displays them next to the question. The same process is available for email design-related problems. All answers, screenshots and code snippets are archived for later queries and troubleshooting, nothing being lost.
A reputation system is available for registered users, members getting reputation points only if their answer is considered to be good enough and voted as helpful by others. If an answer gets a favorable vote, the user will automatically receive five points. If the answer is voted as not helpful, the user will lose five points. If within a question, a user's answer is voted as the best, the user will get 20 extra points.
A new feature, different from other Q&A websites, is that users with a certain amount of reputation points are able to edit other members answers. This way, website admins have automatically granted moderating rights to knowledgeable users, constantly keeping it up to date. A normal user will be able to edit other people’s answers after gaining 100 points.
Similar services are available for other specialists involved in web design, web development or any kind of IT and networking-related services. They should check out these community Q&A websites: StackOverflow for programming related issues, ServerFault for system administrators, SuperUser (still in beta) for computing topics, and Meta for discussions regarding webmaster.
