This sounds great, but I have a few comments.
First off: Is there going to be -- or should there be -- guidelines about the layout. ie, do we want to stick with a single left column with a header and footer? Or are people allowed to use their creative judgement with this?
On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 08:49 -0700, Joshua A. Andler wrote:
*All submissions must be standards compliant (XHTML 1.0 Transitional & CSS) and render the same across all browsers (within reason of course).
Why Transitional? I think this is a really bad idea; Transitional DTDs are designed for when you are *transitioning* from a previous standard. If the website is being completely redesigned there is *no* reason not to use a strict DTD, other than laziness.
Also, it might be wise to mention the separation of content from presentation. It's perfectly possible to pull of an XHTML/CSS site using horrible non-semantic markup and using CSS just to change the fonts. But that would be stupid.
Another thing is that it might be good to specify accessibility guidelines to aim for. Accessibility will *always* be down to human judgement to an extent, but it might be nice to say "try to follow the WCAG level 2" or something.
Finally, I think you absolutely must define the browsers in which is must perform well in. Surely you don't want to support NN 4? What about really uncommon browsers? It's better to have a list I think. (When I say "support" I really mean "serve CSS to".)
Deadline: *September 15, 2005
I'd say this is slightly too soon myself.