Sunday, June 18, 2006

What was @Media in 2006?

The list of speakers and panel members at this year’s @Media Conference in London, reads like a list of authors in my bookshelf.

For a schedule of this year’s conference, you only need to go to the Vivabit Web site and so I won’t repeat the format of the sessions here. Before you read this very positive report you might like to have a look at my Flickr set here.

The event took place at the The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre which is very near to Westminster Cathedral and Big Ben.

furthermore...

2 days

So here is my rundown of the 2 days. There were some double track sessions so I didn't get to see everything:

The conference started with a very well known styling expert, so it was crucial to get to the conference early and get a good seat. The keynote speaker is someone we (web designers) surely all admire - Eric Meyer. [pic] and he gave a very interesting talk about the history of the developments of CSS and the web standards movement. His presentation covered the last 10 years of history and although it seemed at first to be rather introspective, I took from it the message that the best developments in this technology have been shared ones. That is, the key thrust of his thoughts were that we should share and form communities to discuss our ideas. The Web Standards project was created by a group of people forming a community and inviting others to join an advisory panel.

Follow the Tracks

Track one followed with Jon Hicks, Cameron Moll and Veerle Pieters. Their collective panel was divided into three topics: grids by Moll, Typography by Hicks and colour by Pieters. The grids piece interested me more than others and I even managed a question regarding document flow from the bottom of a column to the top of the next. I won't elaborate here. The grids chat was interesting because, I feel that I have already been doing that kind of thing but I just hadn't formalised it so much. The key message here is to create a grid rule (and apply some principles of proportion and ratio), but then violate the grid when needed. Some cool examples were given. Moll told us about a book called Making and Breaking the Grid. This reminded me of the article called Designing for the Screen I wrote back in 2003.

Hicks gave a lucid presentation about typography and the use of fonts. I particularly liked his screen showng 'Farmer Gows' (we take the children there sometimes) and their appropriate use of Comic Sans in their signage. His other example where he replaced the fonts used in the Sex Pistols album art was a clear demonstation of the right font for the right context. Hicks mentioned Elements of Typographic Style.

IE7 is Coming

In fact it was a shame the two next presentations clashed across the 2 tracks. I felt inclined to catch the talk by Microsoft's Chris Wilson [pic]. He gave us the rundown on the next release of Internet Explorer. This was a splendid talk and was a kind of apology for taking so long to get all of the IE bugs sorted out. I was particularly pleased to hear that quirks mode will not be invoked when using the prolog XML declaration. This means that all my pages for the School of Arts and Humanities will be delivered in standards mode in IE7. bad news though, is that we cannot set up a test rig on the same PC that is currently running IE6. There will be no 'side by side' functionality. I need another PC for testing purposes.

Internet Explorer 7 will be shipping second half of 2006 and there are 2 more releases in the plan over the next 5 years. Chris Wilson's team are committed to sort out most of the CSS bugs but the Acid2 test will not be fixed totally in the first release. Here is another snippet of news: IE7 supports the 'open search' descriptor. This means that if you included the following in the meta head of the page:

<link title="My Provider" rel="search"
        type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
        xhref="http://www.example.com/provider.xml">

Then the users will get a reference to the search on your site in the UI search box at the the top right.

Here is the blog about the development of Internet Explorer 7.

Bugging Hacks or Hacking Bugs

Andy Budd, who runs a web dev company called clear:left, gave a talk about Bug Hunting. I took a picture of him and I couldn't resist hacking it, since his talk related to such issues. His slides were beautifully illustrated with images of bugs (butterflies, caterpillars, spiders and all sorts), sourced from Flickr apparently. Actually, I must have found them a bit distracting, because my notes a very sketchy. Budd did a good job here but I can't say that there was much new for me. I do take issue with one thing that he said - , use Tantek's box model hack and don't use conditional comments. This I cannot agree with this for the very simple reason that Microsoft's release of IE7 may break that hack whereas the conditional commenting method is more likely to be future proof. There was mention of IE's layout property. This wasn't explained (unless I was distracted by a butterfly) so I looked it up.

Web 2.0 Hype

Jeffrey Veen finished the afternoon with a terrific head-on crash into Web 2.0. I guess the issues of Ajax and 'web applications' has been on everyones' radar recently , so it was good that we got a few tips on how we should approach designing for these little web thingies that update as we click. I was struck by his idea that we are no longer designing web pages but states of pages. Veen gave some good examples of sites that allow 'Users to Control their data'. Check out these:

• Kayak Travel
• iFilm - have a go with the registration screen

Jeffrey Veen [pic], who is the author of The Art and Science of Web Design, also pointed out a couple of books. So I have added to my list: Emotional Design and Persuasive Technology. He also suggested that we read The Architecture of Participation by Tim O'Reilly.

The social gathering in the evening was interesting, but, sorry to say this ('cos you might think me a boring old fart), it was just too loud for me! I met some nice people but they couldn't hear what I was saying and I, certainly couldn't hear them! The music just seemed to get louder and louder.

Kick Off

Did I mention that the whole of London was watching the World Cup? Thank goodness that England won against Trinidad and Tobago, otherwise there may have been some angry people out on the street.

So, day 2 then. It kicked off (get it?) with Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design Design. I really liked this (here [very big 20mb - includes his new born baby pictures] is his presentation as a PDF). The title of the talk reflects the book of the same name. I have his earlier book - Web Standards Solutions, and I liked this very much.

Simple

The Dan Cederholm [pic] talk was very informative and I have great admiration for the simple messages in this talk. The point really is simple - make sure that your CSS and layout techniques include strategies for change. One example is that users can (and will) increase the size of their fonts through text zoom. What will happen to those buttons with html text? An image of a building (recently built), used as a warehouse currently, but with bricked up window openings was used to illustrate the point that we should create layouts, markup and css that will provide for future developments.

Cederholm discussed the relative merits of fluid and fixed layouts and he described a technique that I would like to try that involves putting an equal percentage on the side margins. Rollyo has a fixed width home page and then fluid page for the search hits. The issue of clearing floats was brought up and it was suggested that we should take a look at PositionIsEverything's article on a method to clear floats without extra markup.

Dan Cederholm's main message: 'let go of pixel precision' . He has been working on Cork'd.

A panel came next for me and the session on Javascript Libraries was one I could have missed. There were some usefull aspects to it and I am sure that many in the audience engaged fully with it. The discussion just seemed to go round and around: should we use Javascript libraries or just copy and paste the individual functions for our own use? The panel seemed a good mix of opinions here. We got a few useful sources to take a look at, including Dojo, an opensource javascript library.

Around the World

In contrast a speaker with passion. Molly Holzschlag. Sorry I didn't get a decent picture - it was too dark. Her talk was about I18n. What's that, I hear you ask? Not the same as l14n. Answer: just a short way of writing internationalization and localisation. Check out this picture:

Some may say this is the next big thing. And they could be right, after all, as Molly says, it is the world wide web and the world is multilingual and multcultural. The presentation is posted up at w3c [PDF 9Mb]

Molly was very expressive and enthused this audience with ideas of a new www, where pages communicate to everyone in their own language and their own cultural nuances. There was a great show of hands in the audience when Molly asked 'How many are working on multi-lingual projects?' The project at W3C covers the issues.

Can you handle your CSS?

My general impression up to this point was that panels were less useful than single speakers, but the next session for me - Strategic CSS Management - was very interesting and useful.

One major question that came up and was laboured a bit - should we keep the CSS in one file or break it down in to separate components? Each panel member seemed to approach this in a different way and it seemed that there is great variety in the way people handle their CSS files. It seemed that the idea of keeping the hacks in a separate file was the favourite approach, since it could easily be modified or dropped when new browsers come along.

I picked up some useful tips from some panel members and the audience:

• put a table of contents at the top of the CSS file (commented out of course)
• tab the comments for each class / id name over to the right, so that it can be easily seen when scrolling down
• explain the colors in comments at the top of the file

I made a note to myself to look into using HSV instead of hex numbers for colors. This might make it easier to deliver tints and colorways.

The Next Small Thing: Microformats

Shame to miss Andy Clarke on the other track, but I was really looking forward to this presentation from Tantek Çelik [pic].

What are Microformats? A better answer you will get from www.microformats.org. What I learned from Çelik's presentation was this:

People like me who have an About me section on their web site should include the Microformat 'hCard' (similar to vCard) in the markup. This will then enable a sharing of information about individuals. Tantek demonstrated how to add people to ones own address book from hCard data on a web page. This would be of enormous benefit in an organisation like our University staff list. The way to do this is to write in the markup of the page (or person profile) the following code:

<div class="vcard">
  <a class="url fn" xhref="http://www.pagetoscreen.net">Chris Jennings</a>
  <div class="org">PageToScreen</div>
  </div>
  </div>
 

This is just a small sample of the complete specification

Other uses of Microformats include licensing information, events and (significant for academia) citation. The presentation techniques (s5) used here also have another component called XOXO. This is an outlining format.

I liked the way that Tantek used quotations to illustrate his point:

The trick.... is to make sure that each limited mechanical part of the Web, each application, is within itself composed of simple parts that will never get too powerful.
—Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web

Tantek Çelik's presentation was inspirational. He encouraged all of us to come up with ideas for microformat components and post them to the microformat working group.

Hot Panel or was it Hot Topics?

After the final tea break we were treated to a discussion by a panel of 'experts' on topics submitted (earlier on paper) by the audience. I was dissapointed that this sometimes trivialised the opportunity, particularly with the question about the World Cup Football. This may have been a genuine attempt to 'lighten up' after 2 days of very intense discourse!

The final topic was very relevant to me. The question was whether there needs to be a validated qualification from educational institutes for the skills required for this kind of work. I am pleased to say that the panel was agreed that this would be a bad thing. The technology just moves and changes too quickly to be able to be fixed in one time.

Ends.