flash 8 or higher required
i doubt this type of interactivity is easily achieved no matter which technology is employed
to all those flash haters out there (and i am one of them), how would you do this?
A whole lot of JavaScript. Its doable, although the experience would be more fluid in flash.
I have no problem with features on a site being in flash…the entire site made in flash I don’t agree with (as in, no indexable content)
Good use of flash, and yes, it could be done with Javascript as well.
i guess i should’ve been more clear about what aspect of the flash i was talking about
not just the slight “zoom in” when you hover over a particular game, but the actual layout of the brackets themselves, with the lines connecting the games so you can follow the winning teams from the opening rounds to later games
when you guys say “it could be done with javascript” how do you see the boxes for the brackets being laid out on the page?
I’m neither a Flash nor a JS guru, so I can’t speak to that. I can, however, speak to the guys I work with spending time on the site. They didn’t spend a second marveling over the technology, but they did jump right in and begin using it without a hitch. They were able to find games, find info, track teams, etc etc without pausing. Flash or JS or whatever, that’s where this construct passes the usability test.
It could do with a little work on it’s markup, it has a few validation errors (242 Errors, 37 warning(s)). I don’t have a screen reader installed so I can’t say how accessible it would be to someone who uses a screen reader. It fails a useability/accessibility test (via the web developer toolbar in firefox).
By blocking the flash via the AdBlockPlus toolbar and trying the printer-friendly page it shows that there isn’t a non-flash version and so it’s not accessible to people who don’t have flash installed.
I feel that any site that uses javascript and/or flash should still be usable with javascript and/or flash disabled.
spacephoenix, thanks, i had a feeling that someone would chime in with that 
but what did you think of the way the brackets were laid out on the page? and what about that little zoom feature on hover? did you try the “by conference” view? check out the ACC conference
by the way, here’s a non-flash version – http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/ncaa/sports/m-baskbl/auto_pdf/MBK-D1-2010Bracket.pdf
again, difficult to see how one would lay this out using plain old html…
Here’s a couple examples that came up in a search:
http://www.crowsdarts.com/brackets/playoff-chart.html
http://www.weihwa.com/~whuang/games/elimination/index.html
[URL=“http://www.weihwa.com/~whuang/games/elimination/elim_readonly.html?”]
It could be done with <canvas> and lots of javascript. It would be difficult though.
If you did it with plain ol’ HTML it would require loads of extra absolutely positioned elements. It would be a hideous task to give to someone, especially if you wanted to support IE7 and IE6.
foot in the door, but nowhere near the same impact
True, those are more proof-of-concept prototypes.
I’m sure there are more than a few JS & CSS wizards around here who would be up for the challenge, though.
I’m not sure if anyone else will have luck finding these, but there were some gaming tournament webapps I saw a few years ago to keep track of gamers and gaming teams at LAN parties…those were probably better working examples. But of course, I don’t even remotely recall what they were named.
It wouldn’t be too hard to achieve… People manage to produce incredibly complex sitemaps with interlocking pages without resorting to the use of Flash so I would say using some clever CSS positioning or some JavaScript it could be accomplished. I can actually point out that the Wimbledon website (tennis tournament here in the UK) actually achieved a similar thing using JavaScript (though the live scores mechanism was done using Flash purely because of the “live replays” available through video), that being said I think it’s perfectly acceptable to claim that such a mechanism could be done without the use of Flash. I would probably start at absolutely positioned boxed with the content “stacked” using lists and to produce the joining lines… probably some elements with border applied to them (more positioning), granted it would be added code bloat and wouldn’t be perfect… but it would be more accessible and less dependant on the Flash plug-in.