Well my first web conference was most enjoyable… here is a brief round-up of my highlights…
Day 1
Eric Meyer‘s Keynote presentation was an enjoyable journey through the last ten years showing how CSS and standards have developed and as a relatively recent convert to CSS layout (20 months down and counting) it was good to get a history lesson to kick things off.
Jeremy Keith‘s session on using DOM Scripting was one of the things I was most looking forward to. I have found the Dom Scripting book really useful this year and this session didn’t disappoint. As I had hoped Jeremy took some of the ideas in the book a bit further looking at how to plug the holes in CSS using the DOM.
Although I was a little disapointed to have to miss Dave Shea’s web typography session (looking forward to the podcast)… I felt I owed it to my employers who had paid for this conference trip to find out what I could about the new release of IE and the launch date. Chris Wilson pretty much said what I was expecting (having now test driven the beta 2 release). He pretty much confirmed that ie7 would be arriving by the end of the year although he seemed to me to suggest the next 2/3 months. One interesting thing he also mentioned was the IE7 ReadinessToolkit.
I was originally going to go to the WCAG 2.0 debate at this point in proceedings but having read much commentary (and the now infamous Joe Clark article) concerning the new guidelines I decided to avoid this… based on how much useful information I have recently got out of reading Andy Budd‘s Web Mastery book I thought his session would be more useful in the short term.
I’ve got to be honest and say that Jeffrey Veen – ‘Designing the Next Generation of Web App’s was not a session I was that bothered about when I first saw the programme but it turned out to be rather good and Jeffrey was an excellent speaker looking at the changing face of the web.
Day 2
Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design was was a good way to start the day but it was Robin Christopherson’s session, ‘Beyond a Code Audit’, that turned out to be my highlight. Although suffering from the WiFi problem I was really impressed with his content and it really helped me to actually see a visually impaired user working with the web first hand. As I work as an in-house designer for an FE college I was particuarly interested to watch him take apart the South Cheshire College website.
I unfortuately missed the first half of Cameron Moll’s – Mobile session but I did pick up a few interesting ideas from what I did catch and can now say I’ve finally installed Opera Mini on my Motorola V3.
The Strategic CSS Management panel was fairly useful but didn’t blow me away while Tantek Celik‘s – ‘Microformats: Evolving the Web’ was also excellent and I expect to be using microformats much more in my work this year.
Finally, the Hot Topics panel was very entertaining and finished off a good conference.
Looking forward to next year.
Links to presentation notes
