SVG Progress Bar Contest

Thanks to the W3C Twitter feed, I discovered a W3C blog post about an SVG contest, “No Bit, Sherlock.” While the W3C may be pushing the contest, they aren’t the sponsors. The contest is produced by Web Directions, an organization founded by John Allsop and Maxine Sherrin to create web developer conferences around the world. They pushed Microsoft UK to pony up some prizes for a contest, owing to Internet Explorer 9’s plans to support SVG, something sorely lacking in all prior versions of IE (you can grab an Internet Explorer 9 preview release if you really want SVG now).

The gist of the contest is simple: Create a progress bar in SVG. Contestants are allowed leeway in how it looks and functions, but it must adhere to two key elements:

1. It must indicate to a user when waiting in an indeterminate state, and
2. it must indicate to a user how much a process has progressed.

Here’s the catch: It must be submitted by June 11 at 2pm, British Summer Time (yeah, I’d have to call someone in Britain, too). The date was probably chosen to coincide with the Web Directions @media conference in London, June 9-11. You can read John Allsop’s blog post about the contest and why they thought it up.

The criteria, from the “No Bit, Sherlock” site:

1. Your control has to work acceptably in the latest versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Intenet Explorer 9, so it would probably make sense to at least give it a look see in all these browsers.
2. Your SVG has to validate.
3. The judges will also pay attention to accessibility factors – hint – investigate the ARIA role attribute.
4. And, they’ll take a quick peak under the covers at your code, so the cleaner and more legible that is, the better
5. They’ll also consider how well the control communicates the two states described above, how attractive it is, and if it has that x-factor, then all the better.

Further details, including the list of judges, prizes, and even some SVG resources are all at the contest site. If you are new to SVG, I suggest you take a look at the SVG information at the W3C site.