Apparently the vast majority of attendees at @media have parents who didn’t bother reading past the first few pages of the baby names book, as evidenced by the enormous queue of people waiting to get to the A-C (Firstnames) booth to register.
The upshot of losing out on the geek equivalent of the postcode lottery is that I missed the start of Eric Meyer’s keynote speech.
Eric was talking about the last 10 years of CSS, and how it came to be used as widely as it is today. Lots of interesting historical stuff, some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t.
The first point that had me diving for the laptop to start taking proper notes was when he started talking about the power and impact that a small group of passionate individuals can have. Interestingly (and potentially controversially), he defended Joe Clark’s creation of the WCAG Samurai, which, although closed, if the members are carefully chosen, has the potential to have a huge impact, similar to the impact that the CSS Samurai had, in the early days of the Web Standards Project.
Another point he made centred around Dave Shea’s creation of the CSS Zen Garden, and how this showed designers that CSS wasn’t something that was going to constrain their creativity. Suddenly, designers realised that their sites didn’t need to be boxy and boring to use CSS, and the limitation wasn’t in the technology, but in the person using the technology. The same is very much true of accessibility, and is one of my biggest soapboxes - sites don’t have to be bland and boring to be accessible!
He went on to talk about how XHTML and CSS are being used for applications beyond “simple” web pages - for example, the Adium chat application and some of Apple’s dashboard widgets. He showed an example of a calendar which was entirely coded using CSS rather than with a data table. He did say that the people at Apple approached him to ask if he knew how to do it in CSS only - and his response was yes, but you really shouldn’t. Unfortunately they went ahead and did it anyway. Good to hear him promote the practice of figuring out what you want to do and why you want to do it and come up with a solid reason, rather than just “because it’s cool” or “because it’s new”.
His final point was that if there’s one thing that he’s learned it is:
Community is important, but so is individual action.
Interesting stuff, and a great start to the conference.
