Slashdot Mirror
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."
I guess my submissions of http://www.microsoft.com didn't win after all... :(
...but that winning design still needs some massaging. At least that's what the Machead type-designer in me says. The text spacing is pretty off to my eyes, in both Safari and Chimera (nee Camino) 0.6.
In any case, razor blades flying from my LCD at high speeds would probably be better than the W3C site as it stands. It always annoyed me that their CSS2 page was just about the ugliest one on the intarweb. "Look, kiddies! With CSS, your pages can cause bleeding eyes! Semantically!"
... 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.
--- I do not moderate.
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.
now can someone stop the w3c from their xml trip? by http 6.0, every bit will be xml encoded.
<octet hexvalue="2d">
<bit order="7">0</bit>
<bit order="6">0</bit>
<bit order="5">1</bit>
<bit order="4">0</bit>
<bit order="3">1</bit>
<bit order="2">1</bit>
<bit order="1">0</bit>
<bit order="0">1</bit>
</octet>
If the winner is any indication, it does not. While I do like his design...shouldn't everybody know that Google is spelled with two o's, not three?
What is the relationship of this contest with the W3C?
This contest is not affiliated with the W3C, entries will not be submitted to them. Enter this contest if you are inspired by the challenge and/or excited about the prizes.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Hehe, reminds me of when I tried to feed msn.com through the HTML validator... god did it ever fuck itself...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
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.
Say, those pages looked alright, I bet Slashdot could do a redesign and get rid of thier tables too.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
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.
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.
Cure cancer.. and stuff! www.team45.info
And the real reason you didn't provide a link is because you lied.
The site www.homelesspixel.de is running Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) on Linux.
Kind of offtopic, but this reminds me of this old joke (from Stalinist era, I think):
Today, in preparation of Lenin's forthcoming 70th jubilee, a contest for anecdotes about Lenin was announced. The prizes are:
Third place - 10 years in places of importance in the life of Lenin (Siberia)
Second place - 25 years in places of importance in the life of Lenin plus 5 years in places where other revolutionary heroes have dwelled
First place - an opportunity to meet the great leader in person
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
so this is what happens when /. /.'s itself
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).
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).
Finally one can go to the page without feeling like having had extensive eye surgery.
I am the Barber of Seville.
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...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Refreshing doesn't help, but if you scroll around the page for a while, you will eventually have everything redrawn in another (more correct) way than refresh. Go figure!
.sig
Works great in Debian GNU / Linux - Galeon 1.3.3, Debian GNU / Linux - Mozilla 1.3, Mac OS X 10.2.5 - Safari 1.0 Beta 2 (v73) (damn fast!), and Mac OS X 10.2.5 - IE 5.2.2.
Cheers!
- I don't have a
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
Did anyone happen to translate the latin text at the bottom of Radu's page? It's been a while since I took latin, so I'm very rusty. Here's the text:
"copyright ©2003 blah blah lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Duis autem veleum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel willum lunombro dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi."
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
good you you...
Cure cancer.. and stuff! www.team45.info
You're missing half the beauty if you don't grab the Toggle CSS Stylesheet bookmarklet/favlet and use it when you check out the winning entry.
Because of all the proper structure in the HTML (like proper usage of Hx, and Acronym tags), it still looks good and is easily readable without the CSS. It even unhides "skip to" links (see Dive Into Accessibility) for easier navigation at the top for non-visual browsers.
My only quibble is the repetitive usage of spans with a class called "none" to hide the navigation dividing pipes ("|") when CSS is enabled. Maybe a structure using unordered lists might read better semantically.
It's the printing/design industry's standard piece of dummy text, used by designers like me when making mockups.
It dates from about 1500, and is a garbled version of Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC.
www.lipsum.com has more info, translations, the ungarbled version and so on.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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).
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Make the Tyranny of the Three Column View stop!
Next they'll have rss feeds and w3cboxes!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Whats important now is to keep moving forward! Don't let your self, friends, family, clients, company, etc put up any new sites that don't at least try to validate. They don't have to be perfect, just at least try and put some effort into it.
For those of us who learned HTML in the 2.0 & 3.x days, it takes a little bit of relearning in terms of how you approach markup, but it really is worth it.
Go run your homepage through validator.w3.org. Fix 5 things. Make it a goal one weekend to make your site validate with less than 5 errors. It really is remarkably easy, we're talking about markup and stylesheets here people.
during the big db mess up today you post showed up with only a sig and no content.. hence my snide remark.. sorry chap.
Cure cancer.. and stuff! www.team45.info
My vision isn't great (I'm certainly not blind, but I need larger fonts than many sites seem to think looks "cool"). When CSS starting becoming popular for font sizing, I had to switch from MSIE to other browsers. I'm sure a lot of other people like me followed suit (but not enough that MS cared, apparently).
Frankly, it wouldn't be a problem if IE weren't so pervasive. Current versions of Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape ALL support changing the font sizes declared in CSS. Generally (sometimes minor config required) you just hold ctrl and roll the mouse wheel.
I find this MUCH more useful than overriding the stylesheet, for instance, because I still get to see what the "real" site looks like, then I can decide to crank up the font size by a notch or two so I can read comfortably.
By the way, the designs in this contest all handle font scaling well.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I like simpler pages, like the old-style GNU page. Why do people always have to try to make websites look like newspapers, with zillions of tiny columns of text?
My best guess so far is Windows users that can't figure out how to use software non-maximized complaining that text doesn't fill their browser window otherwise. Any other explanation seems nuts.
And rollover highlighting? I had thought that had died a long time ago, when people realized that users hated it.
May we never see th
no 900k flash intro? one that gives me a thumping techno beat as the letters "w3c" flash into existence before my eyes?
not a terribly modern redesign, obviously. These people need to get with the program.
All those pages look pretty bland to me. I wasn't very impressed with them. They are functional, I guess.
Eye candy please. No, I'm not talking about Flash and all that junk, just need to splash the page with graphics or something. Way to plain.
Oh well, back to my MTV and Shiney things.
[insert witty comment here]
I totally agree. There is no need for the w3c to whiz-bang its site. If you are looking for standards information, then you probably already realize that it is a good idea and don't need to be sold on it.
I enjoy using the w3c site mostly for its content, but also because it renders well on any browser that I use, doesn't require plugins and doesn't generate JavaScript error dialogs with every click (yes, i know how to disable those. as a web developer, i leave them on).
The one suggestion I would make to w3c is to improve navigability. Their use of top-level TOC for documents has fallen by the wayside of late, which forces you to dig through the pages some to find what you want.
If selling the idea of standards-based technologies as tools for whiz-bang sites is an issue, then create a gallery and link to it. Leave the w3c site alone.
-brian
It should really have been done in XHTML Strict DTD.
Pretty much anything can be designed well in Transitional DTD, but doing it in Strict is far more challenging (and this is the DTD that the W3C home page is done in, so it should have been the required DTD).
When doing it in Strict, as much of the design and layout, as possible, is moved away from the structural layout and into the CSS/XSLT, which is not the case with transitional. The full and real benefits of seperating markup are not gained using Transitional (making the design more portable and flexible between media).
This is the Black Art to markup coding and it's pay off is the flexibility and portability of the structured markup between media. Of course there are the down sides of decredation in various browsers, but there are now more and more good reasons to support using Strict than ever before. The improvement in browser support and the increasing use of other media and devices shows the change in this landscape.