A report on the seminars and the nice people I met in London for @media 2006.
It was the second year for this event, the audience grew to a large 800 people to come and learn about the new and emerging web applications and new accessibility guidelines for web 2.0.
>> Eric Meyer started the event with a historic look at the last ten years of the web, there were a few hands up for “who remembers netscape 3?”.
His main point was “Sharing information is the only way to move a new technology forward”. and “with every problem in web language you should write an essay or report to share this and help others move forward”.
and reconfirming that CSS is a simple and powerful language which is increasingly helping to push the web forward. For example at: CSS Destroy and CSS Playground
Full transcript for Eric Meyer’s Keynote
>> Good Vs. Great Design with Veerle, Jon Hicks and Cameron Moll – showed that that design is not just about pretty design, it’s about the effective communication of content too, and there is no one solution.
They discussed individually typography, colour and grid design. And how some colours and type work with some web themes, where as others are just wrong!
Download the presentation slides (PDF file – 3.5 MB)
>> Chris Wilson of Microsoft reported on the new IE7 browser. And whats in store for the future. It’s been five years since a new version of Internet Explorer, and he explained what they had been up to all this time!
Full transcript for IE7 and Beyond
>> WCAG 2.0 – The new web accessibility guidelines by the W3C, was relevant to new web technologies. The panel mentioned a new book on this subject and referred to PAS78 being a way to implement accessibility and not guidelines themselves. Web pages compliant to WCAG should be POUR:
- Percievable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust
Full transcript for WCAG 2.0
>> Jeff Veen is always a good speaker. His topic “The next generation of web apps” showed that powerful tools in the hands of people with passion for the web is changing the way we view the media now. Blogs, wikis are all diverting our attention away from mainstream media.
He also covered what the elements should be for a Web 2.0 application – “Surface – Skeleton – Structure – Scope – strategyâ€?
- Surface, typography color layout grids, iconography. Things that give desirability, brand. Blogger as an example of something I worked on with doug bowman who is also at Google now.
- Skeleton: About the web application and how it works. what you can poke at
- Structure: how is all the stuff organised in the site.
- Scope: What of all of this what can we do now? What is out organisation going to focus on?
- Strategy: What is our reason for being?
Full transcript of The Next Gen of Web Apps
Download the presentation slides (PDF file – 18.5 MB)
>> Dan Cederholm carried on his excellent hands on topic of Bulletproof web design. He mentioned his 10 second usability test where you: take away the CSS, images > can you still read the page?. An unscientific way, but easy to add to site analysis workflow.
He also covered validation techniques and new bulletproof concepts such as link and bullet list examples.
The bulletproof concept.
- A catchy phrase
- The positive power of buzzwords.
- Embrace flexibility
- Let go of pixel precision
- Plan ahead for worst case scenarios.
Means >> Great Web design.
Full transcript Bulletproof web design
Download the Presentation Slides (PDF File – 20MB)
>> And finally a superhero panel – Hicks, Holzschlag, Celik, Meyer and Keith (see pic below) discussing “Hot” Topics.
Full transcript of Hot Topics
All in all a great conference for the front end web developer and any web team who wants to increase their learning and experience with web standards and Web 2.0 applications.
I should have taken more photos, how ever there are some good pics up on Flickr.
Meanwhile the speaker list has just been added to this years d.construct 2006.
