10k Apart

This year I entered the 10k Apart competition for the first time. The challenge was to create a compelling website that can be loaded in 10kb or less and works without JavaScript. I wasn't too worried about the 10kb limit, I'd done a few tests and concluded that as long as I wasn't using any imagery 10kb could get me pretty far with gzip compression enabled. The thing that really threw me for a while was the lack of JavaScript - probably a sign I've become over-reliant on it. Whether that's a bad thing or not is probably a discussion for another time, but definitely wasn't useful in this instance.

After a bit of thinking I managed to come up with a couple of games that used only HTML and CSS, I'll cover these in detail in a different post. I went down a different path than the majority of other entrants though and decided to completely omit JavaScript altogether rather than using progressive enhancement like the winning entries did. This was probably a mistake but I had a lot of fun stretching the limits of what was possible with pure HTML and CSS.

Unfortunately, my entries were a bit rushed due to a pre-planned holiday and weren't quite up the standard I wanted, but I did enjoy taking part and learned a lot in the process. It's also given me a lot of inspiration to continue creating small projects using the latest techniques, the results of which I will post about on this site. This will hopefully allow me to further develop my skills, as well as practicing for next year!