I think one of the things that seemed to cause some confusion with my project is that people expected it to be instructional. I also sensed this with some of the other projects, too.
In general the response to my project was very positive, but I also think that people do not realize how hard it is to work with CSS or what my site really did. Some of the problems that I encountered (getting the flash to work properly in firefox, formatting without tables...etc.) involved code trickery of one sort or another. I spent alot of time on 'code junkie' sites reading about the various problems and solutions.
I think there are few people in studio (at least in 6190) that even realize why CSS is important or what it does, which is troubling to me as I see CSS as an important part of the future of the web. It is also the reason why I developed the alternate style sheet so that people could see CSS in action. CSS is also, to a certain point, part of the whole drive towards web based standards. Of course, I could have perhaps explained this better in either my project info or in the showcase.
To sum up, I really learned alot with my project. I'm glad I got to use Flash and learn it, but to be honest the accessibility and compliancy issues bother me alot. Yes, Flash is cool and definitely seems to be the 'hot' development tool at the moment.
Although I think all of the Blue Socks winners definitely deserved their awards, it did bother me that all of the winners were entirely Flash, with the only exception a hybrid html/Flash site ('walk to rhythm'). I do not know if that is typical or exactly the criteria used to judge the Blue Sock awards, but it would seem to me that accessibility should be part of the discussion. It has bothered me off and on (sometimes more, sometimes less) than UGA seems to be moving away from web compliancy and standards -- or at least, it seems some parts of the website would be of little use to those with disabilities or even very slow modems .
Michael's timely post to the listserv about accessibility and providing written transcription of audio components of websites was certainly relevant, but there is also the other side of it: text reading/audio web transcription of websites for the site impaired.
Perhaps categories for the Blue Sock award would be useful, because a site that is completely ADA and W3C Compliant is probably not going to be the prettiest.
