The Sanity Clause

Currently coding for html email is a painful process, making me feel I’ve gone back in time to the days before web standards. So yay the Email Standards Project!! This has been started by the guys at Campaign Monitor who are just awesome. The focus of it is to help and encourage email client manufacturers to introduce better standards support. There is a great article on Campaign Monitor’s site that explains why standards support is so important and how it can benefit both clients and designers. There is also a suggested baseline for standards support.

This approach of starting with getting consistent accurate support for the baseline first seems to me a great way to get things started. Sure, I would love to see full support for standards in email clients (it would make my life so much easier!) but that isn’t going to happen overnight and this is a pragmatic solution.

Well I’m still catching up on writing about stuff that I’ve done recently. A few weekends now, some friends, Sibylle, Brian and Ferrida, and I hired a house in Martinborough for the weekend. It was a fantastic place - built from an old grocery store. We got there on the Saturday, dumped our stuff at the house and then went to Alana Winery for some lunch and a bit of wine tasting.

It was then onto a couple more wineries, Te Kairanga and Ata Rangi. I’ve not really drunk much wine since I’ve been here so it was nice to final taste a few different ones - okay - alot of different ones.

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I’ve been pretty slack again at posting but this time it’s mainly been to actually being busy. Well mostly anyway. Nearly a month ago now I went to Melbourne to visit my cousins. I only had a long weekend there but it was fantastic to see them all, especially Emily and Hannah, my cousin’s two daughters. On the friday, I went to the Pixar animation exhibition at Federation square and also did a bit of shopping.

Saturday, we all went down the Ocean Road to Lorne where we had a bit of a picnic. and then took a ferry across the bay. I then sat up chatting to my cousin, Sue, until nearly 2am. Sue, the girls and I went to the Boathouse at Fairfield park for a coffee and a bit of a walk and then I had a lovely home cooked sunday roast. It was then back to Wellington in the evening. I’m already looking forward to getting back to see them all for a longer visit though.

It’s been some time since I posted anything, mainly because I’ve not really been up to much. I did go to see Monarchy the Musical at Circa, last Tuesday. It was a sort of potted history of the british royalty and very funny with some great lyrics.

My friend, Sibylle and I went to see Theatre Sports at Circa on Sunday night. We’d see a short show by The Improvisors at the Big Look See, which was very funny and hoped this was going to be as funny.

The first half was pretty chaotic but it picked up in the second half which some very funny games, including interprative dance. I would definitely and go see something similar again.

Last Tuesday, I went to another Webstock mini - well the evening bit anyway. Leigh Blackall gave a presentation about ‘Second Life‘, which was interesting but made me glad that I’ve never bothered with it. It seems to be a bandwidth hungry beast, where it is easy, even for experienced users, to get stuck in fly mode.

The second presentation demoed some of the new features in Firefox 3, including support for offline applications. Having seen a taste of what will be in this release, I’ve been finding out about some of the other features such as the microformats detection.

Finally there was a debate titled ‘That Web 2.0 is all fizz and no substance’. Both sides had some interesting and entertaining arguments.

Joe Clark gave a controversial talk about things that we as web developers (in his opinion) shouldn’t be concerned about including font re-sizing and link text being used out of context. I can see where he is coming from, and even partly agree but it also seems a bit glib to just dismiss issues as ‘not my problem’. Pixels may be defined as a relative unit but are not implemented as such by IE - this may not mean much to screen reader or those using screen magnifier but there are other people, such as the elderly, who need to alter the size of text on a page.

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Well I had a fantastic time in San Francisco and can’t wait to go back again and see more of the city. I had nearly three days there but the first two were spent mostly at the @Media conference. Not that this was any great hardship! I stayed in the gorgeous Westin Hotel, where my room contained such a great bed I was tempted never to leave it.

However, I did manage to drag myself away from it. On the first evening after the conference, I went to the evening party but didn’t stay for long. Instead I went to a great thai restaurant and had a meal with Adrienne who I had met at the conferene. It was then back to the hotel for some much needed sleep.

On the second evening, the after conference meet-up was at a bar called John Collins and then dinner at Roy’s, an hawaiian fusion restaurant, with Adrienne and someone else from the conference, Chris. I had a fantastic steak and a lovely glass of New Zealand wine.

On my last day, I bumped into Nancy from the conference as I was checking out. She kindly invited me to come along as a friend of hers was going to take her and Chris on a tour of the city. After we had got some coffee, Ken took us up some Telegraph Hill where we got a great view of the city. We then went to Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39. This is all very touristy but as I was a tourist a must do. Nancy had some seafood from one of the stalls and then we went to get sourdough bread. We also saw all the sealions, gathered on the pontoons and making a huge racket. It was then off to the beach, where it was really cold but great to see that side of the pacific ocean!

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Jesse James Garret opened the conference with his presentation, Beyond Ajax and with his fly open. It was a relief for me to see even the most practiced speakers can have embarrassing moments too.

The first stand-out presentation was Richard Ishida’s talk about Internationalism. I missed Molly’s talk about this last year so it was especially great to hear this presentation. The other hi-light for me was Jeffery Veen’s presentation, especially one particular slide which explained something we try to tell clients again and again, really clearly.

Both Tantek Celik and Dan Cederholm’s talks had me vowing to try out microformats - so I will be adding my own vcard to this site asap (i.e. when I get round to it!).

Well I’ve been to the @Media conference in San Francisco. I thought about blogging about the whole experience and my thoughts about the presentations during them but firstly, I was pretty exhausted from my flight from London for most of the two days and secondly, I really wanted to just listen to the speakers and think about what they had said.

Now I’m back in Wellington and nearly recovered from my jet lag, I’ve decided to finally write about the various presentations and what interested me over the next week.