Remixing Fun

Okay, so I’m late to the party as usual, but this is still pretty cool: WThremix, a contest to see who can take the new W3C home page and make it look less plain.  Maybe even visually striking and exciting.  Personally I think they should have added one more rule, which is that no content or structure can be altered in the restyling.  There could have at least been a “restyled original markup” category.  I’d think about entering, but as you can see from my private attempts (one – two – three) at the same thing back in late September, I’m not exactly a world-class visual artist.  Like you hadn’t guessed that by now.

Anyway, I really like the contest idea.  We have a site that uses valid structural markup to hold its content, and CSS to lay it out.  One of the great things about CSS is that the user can change a site’s presentation to suit their own needs, whatever those may be.  Similarly, it’s possible to take the same markup and completely change its layout and appearance just by changing stylesheets.  This is one of those really amazing things about the (X)HTML+CSS combination, and browsers are up to the task of making such things possible.  Contests to restyle sites may not be exactly what the specification authors had in mind, but it’s a creative application of all the promises of W3C technology.

I have been falling behind in my journal entries of late, but that’s because I’ve been trying to correct my falling behind in e-mail.  I’m getting tantalizingly close to catching up—just in time, of course, to go offline for a few days.  C’est la guerre, if I got that right.

To those who celebrate them right about now, please enjoy your holidays!

• Remixing Fun was published on Sunday, December 22nd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Personal and W3C categories.
• There have been no replies.