Bruce Lawson’s personal site

There’s techy write-ups of @media all over the Information Superinterweb by now, so here’s my Daily Star/ National Enquirer-stylee round-up of all the goss.

• The level of enthusiasm and knowledge amongst the delegates was amazing. In a show of hands, nearly everyone is already making fully-css sites (layout and all). The appetite for discussion and information was tremendous. (Anyone want to resurrect glasshaus?)

• In American web dev conferences I’ve been to, about 40% of the delegates were women. In this first UK conference, it was only about 15%. However (just to dispel any worries you might have that I’m turning into some kind of PC Warrior) I’m proud to report that 90% of all of the British web standards women are total babes. Yay Britain!

• Molly rocks. But then you knew that.

• Joe Clark seems like a lovely bloke, and can swear admirably.

• I’m pissed off that I managed to miss Isolani. Next time?

• The surprise highlight for me was Jeremy Keith’s thought-provoking and hilarious presentation about using the DOM for good, not evil. I particularly liked his idea of using DOM scripting to write out the non-semantic span bollocks we need for image replacement or adding two background images, so you don’t need to pollute your code.

  As Jeremy called me “a sick man”, I’m going to confirm his opinion by asking him how I can script the DOM to add a CSS behavior to make IE respect the CSS blink property, and maybe add a standards-compliant scrolling marquee “style” that would’ve been wonderful on my CSS Zen Garden entry, Geocities 1996.

• There’s a JavaScript meet-up with PPK, Jeremy, Simon Willison, Dean Edwards and other luminaries today. I’d love to go, though I know fuck all JavaScript, but have a train to catch. (Let’s call it “DOMscripting”; DHTML or JavaScript have too many negative connotations, while Ajax just sounds wank.)

  (Actually, I wanted to go to the meet-up precisely because I know nothing about JavaScript. When you’ve become excited about the potentials of a technology (as Jeremy’s speech made me feel) surely the best way to learn how to do it well is to sit and listen to the finest practitioners discuss it)

• The Day’s Hotel, Waterloo is neither in Waterloo (it’s in Lambeth), nor is it a hotel. It’s a kennel.

• The conference was really well organised, with some really nice touches (like a cloakroom for suitcases on the last day so you didn’t have to lug your bag round). Nice one, Patrick! In a spirit of constructive criticism, some trivial housekeeping suggestions for next year:

  • More water in the coffee breaks
  • A venue with a long, long urinal trough in the Gents loos for optimal throughput. For the first time, I appreciated what women have to go through. [Stay tuned for a future post on the Usability of Gents Loos.]
  • A conference blog or something so that delegates who come to London the night before can arrange a meet-up; as an inveterate shmoozer, I wish I’d had that extra networking evening, but (like many, I suspect) didn’t feel confident enough to email people out-of-the-blue to set up a party myself
  • Some more roving mikes to get snappier Q&As.

• Derek Featherstone is as pissed off as I am about the accessiblity urban legends out there (”Screenreaders can’t handle JavaScript”) and I think we agreed to try to do something to dispel these myths. So: let’s have facts, version numbers, verifiable data. Old wives’ tales help no-one.

• I’m now way too excited about CSS 3 and xhtml 2. I really should get a fucking life.

• Wouldn’t it be great if the manufacturer of a largely-reviled browser got talking to a grassroots organisation pushing for web standards? (Just hypothetically speculating).

• Andy Clarke is going to Barbados with Gwyneth Paltrow. And he publicly rubbed my nose in it. The bastard.

• Serious bit: I’m not sure that I actually learned anything new at @media apart from the fact that DOMscripting is groovy and I’m a total retard at DOMscripting - and I think I knew the latter fact already. Like most conferences, the majority of my learning was in networking conversations; I’m understanding DOCTYPES and MIME types better and plan to change mine after next week’s holiday.

  But my biggest take-home was the knowledge that we are doing the right things. Sometimes, when you’re on your own in big organisations full of sceptical colleagues, you can begin to doubt yourself. Getting together with like-minded people helps you recover and re-empower yourself. (Does “re-empower” sound too much like bullshit Californian pyschobabble?)

  Also, on a personal note, I’ve been banging on about accessibility and Standards since 2001. Not a long time compared with Zeldman, Molly, Joe Clark et al, but a long time to feel like you’re in the wilderness. So we’ve occasionally engaged in a circlejerk of keeping each other’s spirits up and affirming each other. The great thing about this conference was seeing loads of people that I’d never encountered before. From feeling somewhat stagnant and incestuous, it really felt like the Standards/ Accessibility is going out into the mainstream.

• In a shock development, Patrick Lauke deprecated the <p> tag, in favour of <span class="paragraph">, but Gez Lemon quickly deprecated Patrick before too many people changed their markup.

Ooh! pictures!

Me and Molly, refreshed

Me and Joe Clark. He is that tall. I am that short.

@media organiser, Patrick Griffiths and Gez Lemon, refreshed.

Other write-ups

• Joe Clark
• Gez Lemon
• Molly
• Isolani
• Malarkey
• Faruk’s got more

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 10:11 am and is filed under accessibility web standards, ephemera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.