A font character is a vector image, as well. In fact, creation of custom images (e.g. fish and Twitter logos) as a font is more complicated a process, and less “markup” related than creating them with SVG would have been.
Personally, I think the rules were imperfect, but not something that anyone should be bitter or resentful of (we all knew the rules upfront and decided to submit our projects the way we did… we should accept the consequences if we didn’t follow the rules and lost accordingly). However, lessons should learned from this and adjusted next time around.
I’m personally not blaming the judges by any means… judges have to abide by the rules given to them for how to judge the contest. And I feel given the structure of the contest, the judges did an amazing job… and made good selections of winners, who deserved to win given the criteria. I personally feel that a design contest shouldn’t have formulaic criteria for judgement, though… there should be a lot of flexibility in how judges are allowed to score entrants. That’s best for the nature of a creative contest.
To learn from mistakes and improve oneself based on them is ideal. I don’t think anyone needs to be forgiven, but I think SPF can learn a lot from this contest to make the next one even better!
Fair enough, then how about some suggestions for the next contest?
-
Weight design more and markup less. I, for example, intentionally complicated my markup in this contest to add things like double-borders to my design. These are little details that I felt made my design better, but I realize in retrospect that they probably counted against me rather than for me. I don’t feel intentional complication for added aesthetic should be penalized in a design contest. It’s counter-intuitive.
-
Consider broader objectives of the contest more and the specific minutia of rules less. I think it was generally understood that this is a “markup” contest, and a no-graphics contest, yet the way the rules were structured (attempting to limit specific implementations of graphics) created a loophole that allowed people to manipulate the general objective, and not only not be penalized, but be rewarded for it.
Just some thoughts.
SVG == Scalable Vector Graphics. No image there. 
BTW, when you put font-size:200%, or 5em, it’s based on the font glyphs (which is a graphic) ability to… Scale! That would make font-sizing out of boundaries for the designs in the comp.
I also suggest this thread be locked. It seems the subject is too sensitive for a normal “after the facts” analysis. I personally find this odd.
I would’ve expected: “Wow, how did you think of this!”, “Why did you do that?”, “This is what I thought will be my personal touch” discussion kind of type, that’s all. Like in a real tech forum.
Off Topic:
Could staff please change the name of this thread to a not so ill intended title. I didn’t chose it, staff did, and put my name on it, and it makes me wonder what’s up with that.
PNG == Portable Network Graphics. No image there
No, I’m kidding, they are both images, thats what graphics stands for.
It’s not the topic that’s not sensible, but the approach.
While the “Why did you do that?” talk seems to have remained in the congratulatory topic.
PNG and SVG are both images like C++ and HTML are both compiled.
An image is a bitmap format. A vector is a path format.
Graphics certainly doesn’t stand for images. You got the inclusion wrong.
Could you please answer me what I did wrong? Pointing out discrepancies? We’re tech people, that’s what we do.
Congratulatory talk was also part of my posts. But I like to make the comp about tech also, to make it real. It’s not some meaningless fundraiser party kind of event, it’s a tech comp where we suppose to also learn. I can disagree. And I don’t use volatile argument, nor do I trash competitors work. I try to evaluate it correct so they also can understand the REAL value of their project, as seen by somebody else. I would’ve expected better: critics, critics and more critics.
I don’t smile at your face and stab you in the back later. I am more direct, I stab you when you see me clearest. 
And I see it as a virtue. Direct. Correct. Equals Tech.
And it seems I will not get elected again for the employee of the month for this. Which is fine.
Honestly? I think it’s the fact that there are quite a few people that think (fairly or not) that you - and others - (seemingly) found the judging to be biased and unfair as their interpretations of the rules (as refined through the initial thread - not the initial post) differed from yours. The competition was intended to be fun and to get the forum members to think outside the typical three column or fixed width sites and see how far they could stretch themselves and the browsers capabilities.
That’s what I find most disturbing is that people are getting riled up over some nitpicking semantics, and the fun of the contest is somehow diminished.
All this ruckus for a freakin’ coffee mug! 
Could you please say exactly where in my interpretations of the rules I was wrong? They are still there, and I gave clear examples.
Funny! The winning design has this in it’s divs structure:
<div id="main" class="large">
<div id="leftcol">
<div id="rightcol" class="right">
It’s not for a coffee mug, at all. I thought this was a forum where you can disagree in a civil way. This comp seems to be so volatile that mods them self are using foul language in order to keep any different voices tucked down. And I point here at spikeZ.
The comp was intended to be FAIR. And fun. Otherwise, it’s just a lie. And I don’t mean “fair” to me, let me be clear on this. Nor do I have someone else in mind as the winner. Fair as in being able to see the cracks. And ADMIT them.
LEONARD COHEN - “Anthem”
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Haven’t you been crawling the forums? read here The fancy term explains everything that is happening.
so from wikipedia
A variant of the induced-compliance paradigm is the forbidden toy paradigm. An experiment by Aronson and Carlsmith in 1963 examined self-justification in children.[12] In this experiment, children were left in a room with a variety of toys, including a highly desirable toy steam-shovel (or other toy). Upon leaving the room, the experimenter told half the children that there would be a severe punishment if they played with that particular toy and told the other half that there would be a mild punishment. All of the children in the study refrained from playing with the toy. Later, when the children were told that they could freely play with whatever toy they wanted, the ones in the mild punishment condition were less likely to play with the toy, even though the threat had been removed. The children who were only mildly threatened had to justify to themselves why they did not play with the toy. The degree of punishment by itself was not strong enough, so the children had to convince themselves that the toy was not worth playing with in order to resolve their dissonance.[
Basically saying that by having the victory be something small, like a coffee mug, the contestants had to justify their actions, after all, they can’t be wrong in taking part in the contest and putting in effort just for some coffee mug, so the fact that it’s a small prize only amplified the effect.
I don’t smile at your face and stab you in the back later. I am more direct, I stab you when you see me clearest.
While I try not to run around stabbing people at all. 
The reason is that whenever anyone provides you with evidence for their own views and interpretations, you reject them without question, making it unreasonably difficult to have a discussion.
Also for as for the competition, I stuffed all the tecnical details in the source code, while for me it was more a design challenge, where I had a massive amount of inspiration from here highly recommended for everyone!
also the competition had problems from the very beginning, and I agree that the mods are zipping everyone’s opinion, but why do you think they are doing it? do you think they are stupid or is there more to it? and considering the people here are normally very intelligent, I think it must be something else, maybe it’s the amount of trolls and misbehavior that is growing on the internet? who knows, so what you need to do is write a clear and SIMPLE list of bullet points of what should be improved for the next competition.
I’m not saying you’re wrong - I was saying that your interpretation differed from what the judges interpretation was.
For example, for what is now post #7, you have a problem with the adding text, and you specifically called out Pikacsu87 for his added markup (which for me isn’t text) that created his fish.
Then the “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the rules!” comments could be construed as argumentative.
Yeah, I know, but it also wasn’t a cookie cutter design either which slapped some images in and called it a day…
For the most part it is, but people are human, and these discussions DID take an…unfriendly…tone during the rules discussions where semantics and nitpicking was reigning supreme, and some of the commentary seemed to roll right back to the same discussions that were had then.
At some point, the line had to be drawn, and I know each of the judges placed different weights on different elements (and that’s why judges were picked from different areas of the forum - each brought a different focus to their judging). It wasn’t cookie cutter, plug the numbers into a rubric type of judging. Yes, there were criteria and a basis from which to judge upon, but they weren’t “You have element A, so you get a point here…you didn’t have element B, so you miss that point…”
I know it seems like I’m circling the wagons here, but putting on a contest is not the easiest endeavor, especially for a forum this large - they did the best they could, and I think the perceived notion (again, not sure it’s intentional or not) that they failed, irked some who saw how hard they worked behind the scenes trying to make this an interesting and fun challenge for anyone that participated.
OK, that beckons the question - did you think it was fair? If not, please let me know what you thought was outright unfair - and I’m not talking about the nitpicky (my opinion here) interpretations of the rules. I’m talking about blatantly unfair bias, if there was any.
As they said, if they found something they found was in direct violation of the rules (javascript, etc), it was removed and judged without it. I’m sure if it would have completely broken an entry, they would have asked the competitor to resubmit.
If there was something which was on the line, they took that into account as well. But in the end, they tried to find the entries that they thought were the best and most in the spirit of the competition.
Do you think this works both ways? 
I certainly do so.
For the last time, in how many different ways can the following be interpreted:
Copy is supplied, which can be re-arranged as needed, however no additions or omissions are allowed. […] Doing so will disqualify the offending contestant’s entry!
Also this perfect contradiction:
No SVG.
[…]
Any mark-up may be added to the copy (eg. <hr> , <p> , <br>), in fact it is encouraged, as this is the point of the contest.
This is SVG:
<svg width="100%" height="100%" version="1.1"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<rect width="300" height="100"
style="fill:rgb(0,0,255);stroke-width:1;
stroke:rgb(0,0,0)"/>
</svg>
And it’s JUST markup. It’s not an image (sorry, graphics) :p. Nor content. Not CSS added content either.
@DaveMaxwell
Am I being too unreasonable? Very well then, I’ll be on my way.
But this comp did gave the first prize to a perfectly anonymous semantically deficient 3cols template breaking the rules of no content added (and don’t try to spin it, the whole argument was already put in place previously, you just need to go over this thread’s posts again to see the pros and cons). It’s not even a crazy design, to make up for the lack in mark up. It’s not competitive. It’s… warm.
She added “t”. She didn’t add a bullet point or something decorative. She added perfectly clear CONTENT. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see that just so the whole false “cozy and warm” feeling take over the tech analysis.
And I didn’t make the rules. Don’t shoot the messenger, please.
yes it does, but pointing that out is not how to have a rational discussion.
I know some think I’m spilling fuel into a open fire right now, but I find this differing mindset interesting.
Now let’s ignore the clarifications that came after the first post, and say they never happened.
In the examples that you provide noonnope, it clearly states “no text additions to the markup allowed”, there is no mention about adding styled css content, and even though you might assume it says so by saying “no extra content”, it doesn’t.
Also you happen to point out that SVG is markup
And it’s JUST markup. It’s not an image . Nor content. Not CSS content either.
, which goes well with the argument which I just put in, no extra markup content was allowed.
also in my own biased interpretation, I can’t see a single “t” as content, especially if its not even in the body of the document.
Now I asked some people (to avoid putting in my own judgment) and they agree that the design in the first one was just good, but nothing special, but it’s not just the design that matters, its the markup + design, and there must have made the jury choose what they chose, and considering the number of mistakes that I now see that I made, I respect their decision.
When you take part in any competition you must be aware of the jury, and thats why each jury member is normally presented before the competition, it was hard here because they did not reveal themselves too much, but you could get a general idea by knowing some of the staff at SP.
You knew most of them, so knew what you were going at, and respect is a big part of any competition, no matter how fair or unfair.
(BTW sitepointers, when you run the competition you should consider mentioning the jury, I know you had your reasons, but I think it deserves a re-consideration)
If you’ve bother to read all my posts regarding the comp, you’ll find there are numerous praises I made to Pikacsu87’s clear smart and funny design. Only if you bother to be FAIR.
Also, if you bother to be fair, you’ll see he breaks the rules for mark up and content. Should I only praise comp entries now? I don’t think I get paid enough to do so.
I’m completely lost! What’s “markup content”? Are you a lawyer? Mark up is mark up, content is content. The SVG example I gave has only mark up, no content. It’s the same with CSS border.
It’s not a single “t”. It’s used for twitter logo icon, much like its brother “f”. And a couple of others. And if they display, they must be there, “in the body of the document”. It doesn’t matter who put them there and how.
And the mark up is not outstanding (or semantically sound) either for the first place. It’s a tech forum and it is a shame to look the other way only to create a false sense of global agreement. And wrong.
Praises don’t cancel out the negative, especially if it’s in 2 different posts.
Normally to present something negative, you need to put a positive before and after the negative in the same sentence, also normally the negative needs to be first allowed by who you are criticizing.
Should I only praise comp entries now?
No, your fine the way you are, but avoid labeling other people’s work, because your criticism seems to stem from misunderstanding.
What’s “markup content”? Are you a lawyer?
No, I’m not a lawyer, just a victim of many years of misunderstanding, still even today.
Markup are the tags that add formatting to text content. (Existing content)
Content is when markup or code or anything makes up new information. (SVG)
At least that’s how I see it.
and the display vs actual content can be argued to death, but what matters is what was implemented into the current browsers and why, bots vs humans.
humans see the “t” as a symbol for twitter in this case, which was added using styling, which bot’s don’t see at all.
although I agree that it’s sort-of an image, but so are the borders and gradients, which is where I think most of the problem lies in.
Actually it is an image! it’s added content that supplements existing content, I see what you mean there, so now I must think the contest holders thought of something else when making the contest, it’s not a contest without graphics, it’s a contest without SVG or image files or javascript, just a HTML/CSS ONLY comeptition, whatever the reasons for it, it’s just their “rules”, which I’m sure will be tweaked in the future.
I stayed out of this entire competition, so I’d like to think I’m impartial in this whole affair. Yes, I watched it behind the scene, but I didn’t contribute anything once the contest started.
Yes, I did see where you praised the final effort, but then to call him out for breaking rules (harsh choice of words IMO). And it must be a matter of opinion, because I don’t see how he breaks the rules as I interpret them, which is obviously different than your interpretation - but then I’ve always been one to accept the gray areas vs things being black and white. I look at the effort and go “wow - cool what he could do with straight html and css.”
I didn’t go through it going “why didn’t the judges knock him for this? Or this?” Now, this may not have been your intent, but that’s the way it reads to me. And while they could have perhaps gone through each entry with a fine tooth comb, if they did that, I’m betting few would have gone through unscathed. I’m guessing they went with a “was it a blatant break of the rules, or inadvertent?”.
But I can’t speak for them since I stayed out of it completely - just going with what I see as the end result…
I’m not saying that this was the case here, but following your rationale, this is not judging anymore, is leaving out THE RULES and decide upon your personal preferences. How can one make sure it will be a FAIR judgment then? There’s no way. Hence, THE RULES.
I can say that xhtmlcoder, as the person that he is, probably went over everything with a fine tooth comb, and made his own order of thing, which was then re-ordered according to other members of the jury who (as was mentioned) are from completely different worlds.
How can one make sure it will be a FAIR judgment then
have you ever seen a judgment that was considered fair by everyone?
And what’s that label I put on it? “The biggest XHTML mistake since Yahoo passed on buying Google”? “Breaker of the HTML5”?
You try and make me the ogre I’m not. I said “Fantastic work, incredible smart clear and funny” and then “except it’s not following A RULE for THIS COMP”. This will leave Pikacsu87 work still “Fantastic, incredible smart clear and funny, a real branding effort” it is, outside this comp’s rules.
Again, I feel you’re out for my blood rather than to understand correctly what I’m saying. And you play with putting me in poses and painting me in colors that aren’t there.
Just for information, the judges for this competition were:
xhtmlcoder
ScallioXTX
SpikeZ
The rules that were set out and refined in the original thread were used to judge the competition. It seems that the majority of the entrants were able to figure it out so it appears that they were clear enough.
Μitică, if you find the word pissing to be hugely offensive then I apologise - you may also note that I edited that post shortly afterwards to something that should not offend your sensibilities.
To be perfectly honest I find all this a tad pathetic and childish, arguing over semantics and bleating on about what is fair and what isn’t.
Get over it and move on - or jog on as they say.