Last week myself and Darren attended @media in London, a great conference with a stellar lineup of speakers who were more than willing to stick around and speak to you afterwards. I’m going to discuss a little about day two of @media 2009 and also summarise my thoughts about it. Although a slightly backwards way of doing things Darren will then follow up with his thoughts on the first day of the conference as it had more of a designer bias.
The hot topics panel from @media 2009. Left to Right - Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith, Douglas Crockford and Chris Wilson
The sessions
Day two was aimed towards developers primarily, however there was some very useful info for everyone in attendance to make sure that no-one got too bored. With six sessions, and some suffering slightly from the @media party the night before there was a lot to get through, so let’s crack on.
Douglas Crockford
Doug’s talk was entitled ‘Quality’ and possibly not as the name suggests he spoke about coding quality and how to maintain code throughout a site or applications lifetime. He used the metaphor of Winchester House and software being the same with their constant evolution and hinted at how many sites are superceeded before they come out of beta. Overall an interesting look at an aspect of development that can often be overlooked.
Chris Wilson
Having recently moved from being the Head of Development on the IE team to being an ‘Open Web Platform Advocate’ at Microsoft. Chris’s talk focused on some of the many issues relating to web development and standards, not least the issue of font embedding on the web, I think we’ll cover some of those issues in another post soon. The beers Chris bought me helped to dull the pain that IE6 has caused for us front end developers over the years too!
Molly Holzschlag
As enthusiastic and energetic as ever Molly lead us through HTML5 using a cowboy analogy. She even brought out Bruce Lawson in a full cowboy outfit much to the attendee’s amusement. The basic gist of Molly’s talk was that you needn’t wait until 2022 (as predicted) to use HTML5 you can use it here and now and different browsers have implemented many aspects of HTML5 already.
Andy Budd
As we know usability is key for any website to be successful. For a user to achieve a set goal they need to be able to quickly and easily find the information they require or complete a set task. Andy compared shops and shopping centres with websites and how a user has to navigate around a site. He then moved on to how everyone is able to complete quick, easy, regular usability tests in order to receive feedback for designers and developers to work from. It’s definately something that we’ll be implementing in future.
Robin Christopherson
Robin works for AbilityNet, a charity to help disabled people to use the Internet and computers. He’s completely blind so uses a screenreader to navigate around his computer and the Internet. I’d seen Robin present a similar talk at the Future of Web Design earlier this year and was blown away by how he manages to get around some sites. I think Darren was similarly stunned when watching Robin give this presentation. To get an idea of the problems users having navigating sites with a screen reader, I suggest you watch some videos.
Hot Topics Panel
Moderated by Jeremy Keith, I’m told that the Hot Topics panel is an @media tradition, well the major talking point for this panel was when Doug Crockford suggested something along the lines of
“There’s so much wrong with the Internet we should stop and start again.”
He was deadly serious, now I’m not sure that I totally agree. The very organic nature of the industry means that we don’t know what is going to happen from one month to the next. We have to remember that this is a young industry in development that’s still in its infancy.
My takehomes
Overall it was a great conference and one I’d love to attend again. Not only the talks but the conversations we had with speakers, attendees and like minded people was excellent. The major points that I came away with were those of process and how implementing some of the things discussed by Andy Clarke, Simon Collison, Andy Budd and Doug Crockford for example can make us more efficient which with the economy as it stands can only be good for ourselves, our customers and our customers customers.
One final note
On another note, for those of you that hadn’t heard @media will next year continue but under the stewardship of John Alsopp and his team at Web Directions after Patrick decided to call it day.
