After the exploits of the night before and openning day of the conference I arrived at day 2 certainly in not the state I would have hoped for; lets be honest I was fucking hung-over and the walk to the venue hadn’t helped clear any cobwebs! However with a packed day ahead of me I sucked it up, got to drinking water, consumed a number of sandwiches (which I still believe are the BEST hangover cure) and made my way to my seat for the second and final day to start. I think I will remember this day for a long time to come as one of the best since moving back to London
Dan Cederhome - Bullet-proof web design
I have yet to read Dan’s book of the same name but I am guessing this was based on a chapter/excerpt from it. Having not read the book this was cool - I’ve learnt a lot of nice CSS based tricks from Dan’s website and other book before so was thinking what I would pick -up this time. Basically the points I got from this is to just be really dogged in your checking and development of sites, consider the existing content, the environment and I think most importantly (and the most difficult to check against) what happens when editing of content occurs.
Then looking at sites that he has worked on or seen around the web a few mini projects were discussed and dissected to show the principles that he had previously explained. The stuff which most hit home to me (and also throughout this whole conference) was the almost relentless attacks on ‘boxy’ design and this was no different even in this session where a number of solutions to this were shown - I am no designer but even I will be trying to put some of them into place!
Robin Christopherson - Beyond a code audit
From me, last years @media was all about Robin Christopherson. He gave the most eye-opening talk of the lot and really got me into thinking how we can try and work with him at AbilityNet. As of yet this has not happened, but I am still living the dream!
Unfortunately this year his presentation went very very wrong as the wifi connection went down and all his live HTML sites he wished to show us couldn’t be accessed - therefore making everything a wee bit of a shambles :< (we never found out who it was but the reason that was wifi had gone down was because someone was using the whole bandwidth uploading 30gd worth of files to someplace - we never found out who it was but if it was you I subject you play the error page lottery to see what I think of you!!!)
I did still manage to learn a good number of valuable points regardless of the technology problems - such as providing some kind of highlights when a link has focus from someone tabbing to it, that skip links should be made visible when they are in focus, that assistive technologies cover up a large portion of the screen when they are in use and also that Amazon are still muppets when it comes to using alt text!!
Molly - I18l: Awakening the sleeping giant
It was really inspiring to see Molly on what I would think was top top form (this was later upheld as she thinks it was possibly her BEST presentation ever!!). All I can say is that it was an honour to be there; I hold my hands up and admit that I really didn’t appreciate the passion about all things web that Molly has; I couldn’t help but realise this after hearing this talk.
As the web is probably the one true international medium (any one any where with the correct technology can access any publicly available page regardless of location I think it is something which has to be through of much more than it is now; especially in my line of work where our market is highly global and we require international students in order to develop. As was said, I18n should be through of in the initial development stages as retrofitting leads of multi headaches - and we really don’t want them. It is important to know the markets you are aiming for and develop our sites for THEM using their language, accepted colours, terms and addresses.
In short - I18n - DO IT!
Nate Koechley - Y! vs. Y1
Similar to Chris Wilson’s speech yesterday I felt that it was going to be really cool to hear the thoughts of one of the webs biggest companies talk about what they do and how they do it; turns out I was correct about this and ended up with the most notes of any of the other presentations on this!)
Yahoo are developing a lot of rich applications and to me seem to be heading right to a very AJAX rich site, homepages are tools. This got me to thinking that we should be seeing a lot of developments on the AJAX accessibility and best practises in the very near future as I am sure their developers (which Norm ensures me are the best in the world) will be working like buggery to ensure this. The new homepage and also their photo library stuff look REALLY impressive and I can’t wait for them to be launched as I think it will turn a lot of heads. This can only be considered a good think as a number of the other large companies will have to try and follow suit in order to keep up.
On a practical level we managed to gain an insight into a number of his research results from his project work:
- CSS caching can sometimes not be as good as expected - due to this they will be embedding their styles in the head of the main homepage - raised a few eyebrows that did!
- CSS files should be link to as close to the top of the page as possible - this is to ensure that the styling gets started ASAP when the page is loaded
- JS should be linked to as close to the
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