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.
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>
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
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
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).
The design was submitted by a slashdot reader.
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
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.