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I won a national contest

Article published on:21 May 2006, 09:21

Hello!

I participated in a national contest for applied informatics. I, of course, won the city phase :) and went to the national contest.

I also won the national contest. I'm first. :D

The site with which I participated is PRO-net. I wrote a presentation in Romanian language, see it here.

For those many people who don't know any Romanian, highlights of the presentation:

  • I wrote all the code, my twin brother did all the graphics. Yes, that means we did NOT copy anything.
  • the interface uses only a CSS layout (no tables!).
  • site purpose: professional, clean, accessible, and technologically advanced.
  • clean semantical markup code.
  • bilingual site: romanian and english. You can change the language from the front page (in the upper right corner, under the menus).
  • client-side technologies: valid (x)HTML 4.01 Strict, valid CSS 2, valid RSS 2, DOM 2 Core, DOM 2 Events, ECMAScript 3 (JavaScript 1.5), XMLHttpRequest (AJAX), designMode (WYSIWYG editing), and Flash 8.
  • administration module (Content Management System): upload/rename/delete multiple files at once, add/edit/delete pages, sub pages and news. Pages and sub pages can also be reordered.
  • our own WYSIGWYG editor which is fully functional on Opera 9 (latest weeklies) and Firefox 1.5. Using a completely different code structure than any other online WYSIWYG editor: total separation between code, GUI layout, design and even separate iframe. It allows editing pages with live CSS preview, exactly as viewing the saved document. The code is also extensible, meaning I can easily add new capabilities. The interface is loaded via "AJAX" (that's XMLHTTPRequest).
  • the front page Flash 8 animation works with Flash 7 too (Linux included). If the client has no Flash at all, no problem, since the Flash animation is not shown, it's replaced by an image which looks almost identical. I do not use any server-side/client-side detection at all. Just proper HTML code. :)
  • server-side technologies: PHP 5 (running in Apache 2), XML, DOM 2 Core. The site can have multiple languages (using, of course, Unicode) and multiple interfaces (via CSS and/or XSLT).
  • the site code structure is made so I can easily extend and add new functionality to the site.
  • the generated page is manipulated via DOM during PHP code execution, not as a string. Therefore, I can easily change any part of the document, in any moment.
  • dynamically generated permanent links.
  • and ... the bonus: voice interactivity. Yes, it works only in Opera 8+, but because of a bug I've reported (XHTML+CSS bug, not related to Voice), you have to use the latest Opera 9 weeklies. For voice interactivity I used the following client-side technologies: XHTML+Voice 1.2, VoiceXML, SRGS ABNF, SISR, XML Events, SSML and ACSS. Adding/deleting pages in the administration module also adds/deletes voice commands.
  • highly compatible site: tested with Lynx, Opera 8, Opera 9, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, IE 6, IE 7, Konqueror 3.5. Must work with any browser which implements HTML. Compatibility is not affected by voice-related technologies.

Comments, suggestions, critiques are welcome.

Published in: personal.