Design a Web Page in Under 5k

jhines sent us a nifty bit over at Wired about a Web design contest.. . the catch is the 5k maximum. The prize? 5120 cents ;) I won't enter: the best I could do was Slashdot's Light Mode.

Comments

Validation a big problem here

[Sick Boy]

Something that may get overlooked is that many of these pages won't come anywhere near validation. Who's going to waste precious space on DTD statements and alt=""? We shouldn't assume that small pages are valid simply because they probably don't use a ton of tags. We definately shouldn't convey that attitude to the children. Won't somebody please think about the children?

Show me a page under 5k that validates, and I'll be impressed. Of course, I won't make any outward indication that I'm impressed, probably a contemptious "but it's supposed to validate ANYWAY" snort, but that's the way I am.
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Link to the actual contest

[Otto]

Here's a link to the actual contest rules and so forth.

http://www.sylloge.com/5k/
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Immediately disqualified..

[BilldaCat]

.. is any article by one Jon Katz. :)

server side--no, client side--maybe

[G27 Radio]

from their FAQ:

How about client-side processing? Can I use JavaScript? What if the page shows up as larger than 5k in the browser as a result of the scripting?

Client-side scripting, including the use of scripts which write out additional HTML (i.e., by using JavaScript's "document.write()" function) are permitted. The size component of the judging will be done by examining the files which sit on the server, not the browser's rendering of those files. The normal caveats apply however (see the next question); make sure you are confident about your scripts running in the judges' browsers. Also, please note that gratuituous exploitation of this provision may cause low marks by some judges in the concept & originality category.


The server side question is answered elsewhere in the FAQ--clearly not allowed. What's interesting is that client side scripting could be used to generate much more than 5k worth of HTML, as long as the original page on the server is less than 5k. Of course, you'll want to read the entire FAQ for any caveats.

FAQ available at http://www.sylloge.com/5k/faq.html.

numb

Tight coding contests in history

[swordgeek]

Ah, this sort of thing takes me back.

I remember the days of Byte (when it was a real magazine), Compute!, et al. The magazines were full of code back then, pages and pages and pages of typing that you'd laboriously enter by hand, and then debug. A few of 'em had 1k programming contests monthly, which (along with typing in the loooong programs) really gave you an appreciation for style, efficiency, and elegance in coding. Atari Basic (this was on the 400/800 machines) also allowed you to enter more than one statement on a logical line (which was something like 107 or 112 characters), so they also had 'one liners' every month. They were usually cute little graphics demos, since easy graphics programming was Atari's forte'.

Now we're doing it in HTML instead of BASIC, and with a 5kB limit instead of 1kB. What goes around, comes around, eh?

Cool stuff.