The 5K Contest first ran in the year 2000. It's a new annual challenge for web developers and HTML gurus to create the most interesting web page in less than 5120 bytes. That's right, all HTML, scripts, image, style sheets, and any other associated files must collectively total less than 5 kilobytes in size and be entirely self-contained (no server-side processing).

The 5k competition was originally conceived in the fall of 1999 after an argument about the acceptable file size of a template for a project at work. The creator says, “It took a long time to actually get it organized because, back in those days, we all worked hard at our soul-destroying dot.com jobs and didn't have time for fun personal projects.”

The 5K size limit is pretty much the only rule, and some of the entries are a bit too Zen for a meat-and-potatoes guy like me, but everyone seems to be having a good time. There is the usual crop of games written in Javascript. You've got your Space Invaders, your Maze solvers, your Game of Life. It's the International Obfuscated C Code Competition (see my text Expert C Programming), updated for the new medium and the new millennium. 3D Tetris, post modernism, poetry, art, angst—it's all there, with clever use of Javascript, style sheets, and DHTML. You can even enter an applet if you want.

One nice entry in 2001 is the Timepiece (shown in Figure 27-9). This is an animated clock showing seconds, minutes, hours, date, day-of-week, month, phase of moon, and year. You can choose the time zone.

Figure 27-9. The Timepiece in under 5K bytes.

Timepiece is incredibly busy to look at, but somehow the complexity adds to its appeal. All umpteen axes grind past each other as seconds tick away, a fusion of traffic, tectonics, and time. (Sorry, that Zen poetry style is catching. In less than 5K of Javascript code.) You can see all the 5K winners at www.the5k.org/.

One of the unexpected winners this year was, amazingly and appropriately, an XML entry. Think about it: XML is a “storing” thing, not a “doing” thing! So how can it compete with flashy graphic entries like the 3D Tetris or the Virtual Reality Dolphin? It competed with imagination. People are always looking for something fresh, something original, something that hasn't been done to death before.

Winner Kevin Conboy described his entry as “a subtle comment on the pervasive nature of the Internet.” He tried to imagine doing a “view source” on his life to see what an actual day would look like. Here is an extract from Kevin's essay entry—an XML diary. Kevin starts by getting up, washing, and dressing.

Kevin lunches at a Mexican restaurant with three friends, and spends the afternoon working on graphics production for a client.

Finally, he drives home, has an evening meal, bathes his son, and soothes him, and tucks him in bed before watching a little TV and turning in himself.

That very human sentiment of soothing his family strikes a chord. You (the reader) and I are both now near the end of the day, at the last sentence in this chapter, and maybe we both feel the same way too: curSanity++; good night, dear programmer, sleep tight, and don't let the Tera byte.