Veerle's blog

The @media conference
Lots of people have already posted an extended review of the @media conference , while I was enjoying London during the weekend. So I’m just gonna post my impressions and give you some of the highlights. Jeffrey Zeldman‘s keynote speech was a perfect starter for this conference. After all he is the (famous, at least in ‘our’ world) man that inspired us all and made us care for web standards. Same goes for Molly Holzschlag, she is a real pro and gave us some promising news, an exclusive that we have to keep for ourself at the moment since it hasn’t been officially announced yet.

The presentations I liked the most in general were those from Andy Clarke and Douglas Bowman but that's mainly because I'm a designer and because I can much relate to what they had to say. On day one the talk about XHTML/CSS was more aimed to newbies but it was far from boring. Andy Budd confirmed with his nicely structured presentation that I was using CSS the correct way. The presentation that made the biggest impression on me on day one was the speech of Robin Christopherson. Now that was a real eye-opener. Blind people must have a lot of patience when surfing the web. It was the first time that I experienced such a demo and I have to say now that I did I'll pay even more attention to this.

In general I was surprised that most of the attendees had such high level of knowledge. The questions that people had after the speeches were mostly smart ones, too bad I didn't always fully understand all of them because of sound problems (or too difficult/high level and in English). Also really learned a lot more about accessibility. About how you can test your site. Derek Featherstone did a profound job here. And I'll definitely look into Joe Clark's "Zoom The Web". Joe has a gift of bringing this heavy subject in an interesting funny way so that it sticks. Jeremy Keith's "Using JavaScript for good not evil" was very useful and informative. I still need to do a bit of tweaking on my business site code wise so his information comes in very handy.

As a designer I must say that all these presentations were so refreshing and non-boring. Even if the matter got a bit boring, everybody did had a certain flair of keeping it as much entertaining as possible. I think Joe Clark missed his call for a stand-up comedian :-) I was also very much surprised it was Andy Clarke's first speech. Wow the man got talent!

Thanks to Joe Clark's fast fingers, here are some of the speeches for you to read:

• Keynote speech by Jeffrey Zeldman
• "Web Standards Workflow: How We Worked. How We Work It. How It Will Work Us" by Molly Holzschlag
• "Anatomy of a Mouse" by Andy Clarke
• "The Beauty of CSS" by Douglas Bowman
• "Tactical Maneuvers" by Douglas Bowman
• "Web Accessibility and Disability: A Practical Introduction" by Robin Christopherson and Curt Holst

Conclusion: the conference was a big success. Patrick Griffits did a real good job, certainly if you consider the fact that this was his first. Very courageous of him considering the risk. A big congratz :-)

On a sidenote
The evening before the conference I went downstairs to buy a WiFi access code card to get me on the internet and I wanted to pay with my Visa card. Apparently both cards I have with me got refused. This got me panicked a bit, I didn't understand why, because I was absolutely sure there was enough money on both accounts. The next morning I called Visa, it seems that the guy didn't applied the cards properly. If you glide the cards more then once within a very short time through the machine it will be seen as a security risk and the card will get blocked. I had this with both cards. Visa couldn't de-block them, I just have to get new copies of my cards, since the blocked ones are now useless. So I paid cash for the WiFi (�5 for 4). Since the hotel also accept Maestro I could pay the hotel with my regular bank card. Later on I also realized they didn't tell me that the WiFi code was only valid for 48 hours, bummer... I called the WiFi company because I couldn't log in anymore and I didn't understand why. The good news is that they were very helpful and understanding so they tried to help me out. 10 minutes later they called me back with a new login and password. They actually gave me free access for my entire stay! Finally some luck :-) In the middle of this Visa misery Roger Johansson was sitting in the lounge and came to me and that's how we got acquainted. Now this was a nice break :-) Later came Faruk Ates and before I knew it 30 minutes passed. At last my @media London weekend was looking bright again :-)

PS: pictures of @media and London are in the process. I have a lot of catching up (work work work!) to do first.