WthRemix Winners Announced

joeclark1159 writes "The contest to redesign the World Wide Web Consortium's homepage to look like something vaguely superior to 1982-era lpt output has announced its winners, judged on criteria including standards compliance, accessibility, graceful degradation, and aesthetics. The grand-prize winner, Radu Darvas, is arguably head and shoulders above the competition."

Comments

Great...

[juuri]

... so now we can gave the w3 homepage be a bastion of obfuscation as well.

When will web designers (hi slashdot!) learn that tons of varied visible information on one screen is NOT a good way to design an interface.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

...tons of varied visible information on one screen is NOT a good way to design an interface.

I don't know. I think that being able to find information quickly, through a clear and logically layed out site, is the thing the W3C is after here. Personally, I would not like to go on a clicking marathon to find the content im after. If I can load one page quickly, and find a link to what I'm looking for immediately, I would be quite happy with that.

I am also guessing (hoping too) that many others think that way aswell.

Nothing remarkable

[divide overflow]

It looks clean and organized but also rather bland and generic. Also, I like more contrast between my text and background than the dark grey on light grey color scheme chosen by Radu. I think greater contrast makes the text more distinct and easier to read.

Good looking, compliant and accessible - Top notch

[Isofarro]

The winning entry is an excellent example that it is possible to create good looking, highly functional, structured websites that are also fully accessible. Congrats to Radu Darvas.

Don't know about you guys, but I'm grabbing a copy of his markup and stylesheets - its packed with a number of excellent tips on creating accessible designs. Apart from one or two miniscule gripes that are not worth mentioning - this is a fantastic example of modern web design.

Also, I do like one of the honourable mentions - very clean looking and easy on the eye.

Slashdot Ubiquity

[cheerkiller]

I think it's interesting that so many sites are copying the basic format of slashdot.org. This is only the most recent example. For others visit xwin.org and osnews.com. Innovation is dead.

Re:Slashdot Ubiquity

[buddha42]

A three-column layout has been common since the invention of the freaking printing press.

When the whole world starts looking like slashdot to you, its time to check into a clinic.

What no alternate stylesheets?

[Chilliwilli]

Where are the alternate stylesheets? Larger text options for hard of vision? Higher contrast?
Also none of the entries make use of site navigation links?
Load up wired.com in a new version of Mozilla.. that's how new standards compliant web technology should be done.

Accessible design with fixed font sizes?

[rmonday]

I don't see what's so accessible about a design that uses fixed text sizes. Seems to be an attempt to do page layout, rather than page markup.

To be properly accessible, it should (amongst other things...) be possible to easily change the displayed font size to suit your preference.

With the default MSIE settings it can't be done when the stylesheet specifies fixed pixel font sizes. I realise that most of the size specifications in css are broken in some way in some browser, but just assuming that everybody uses the exact same screen DPI and has the exact same eyesight isn't the answer.

From that point of view, the winning design is a big step backwards from the existing site (and no less cluttered and confusing).

Re:Accessible design with fixed font sizes?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this isn't just another case of IE being broken, it's a problem with the specification. The CSS specs don't say that fonts specified with fixed pixel sizes should be scalable, that's just an assumption made by some browsers. IE not being able to scale fixed pixel fonts is really pretty valid, it's not just another IE broken standard thing like the fact that transparencies and alpha layers in PNGs STILL don't work in IE6 for Windows (they do in IE 5.1 and later for Mac I know).

Where's the improvement?

[macshit]

It must be something hidden like standards conformance, because the `remixed' home-page looks pretty exactly the same as the old home-page, except that the remix seems vaguely more depressing. To be honest, I rather like the old home-page; it's clean, straight-forward, and even kind of cheerful...

Re:Where's the improvement?

[TKinias]

scripsit macshit:

It must be something hidden like standards conformance, because the `remixed' home-page looks pretty exactly the same as the old home-page, except that the remix seems vaguely more depressing. To be honest, I rather like the old home-page; it's clean, straight-forward, and even kind of cheerful...

You must be using an obsolete or non-CSS supporting browser. Out of curiosity I looked at it with SGI's OEM NS4.5 under IRIX and it looks like a 1995-era grey-background all-text page -- but is perfectly usable. That's what graceful degradation is about. He's hiding the CSS from you if you've got a FUBAR browser.

Re:Look ma, no tables!

[skillet-thief]

Say, those pages looked alright, I bet Slashdot could do a redesign and get rid of thier tables too.

Yeah, I am pretty impressed with the absence of tables, replaced with "containers". Unfortunately, the containers have fixed pixel widths.

It is interesting to see that, in spite of his ingenuity, he wasn't able to match up the columns at the bottom of the page.

All the same an interesting example.

Winning design not properly resizable

[Andy_R]

Try making the window thinner - first the content gets squeezed down to a thin strip between those two huge menus, then eventually one menu disappears and random bits of text obscure the content! (ymmv, I'm using Mozilla 1.2 for MacOS).