The Sanity Clause

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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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.

I’ve booked my ticket for @media 2007 now - in San Francisco. I’m pretty excited about going. The sessions that I’m looking forward to the most are Bulletproof Ajax and The Mysteries of JavaScript-Fu. Luckily my plane doesn’t leave until the evening on the 26th so I should get a bit of a look round San Francisco too.