Out of about 1,200 international contestants, the Cornell University Web ProductionGroup of Media and Technology Services came in first place in a contest sponsored by Sylloge.com for designing the best "low-fat" web site.

Web pages entered could be no larger than 5 kilobytes in size. Typical pages weigh in at around 100K;5K is roughly the size of a regular e-mail file. Though the contest was for single pages, Cornell's groupcreated an entire web site in the allotted file size.

The Cornell group, which designs web sites for Cornell's colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences andHuman Ecology and for Cornell Cooperative Extension, entered a site called "a5kRobustScalableInternetOnlineEcommerceFurnishingsOutlet," a mock online stick furniture store.The members of the group are Jeff Katris, Mary Kuentz, Will Morris, Andy Reid, Tom Scott and director Thomas Richardson.

"Every character, even a space, takes space," says Kuentz, a web producer with the group. "A singleletter, for example, takes about 1 byte of space. So to design a web site this lean with only 5K is likebuilding a house with one two by four and a box of nails."

The grand prize for the group to share? Five kilobytes of cash, or a penny a byte, which means thegroup gets to splurge on the 5,120 cents it won.