As this years @media conference has no wifi available, this review is posted after I got home. This will give me the time to collect my thoughts and tinker a bit with this post. More than I usualy do and I hope that this will improve my (ad-hoc) writing style. So with no further ado, I present to you my view of the 2007 @media conference.
Jesse James Garret
The first presentation of the 2007 @media conference is the keynote of Jesse James Garrett, called 'Beyond Ajax'. As this is the man who coined the term Ajax, I am pretty keen to hearing what he has to say.
He starts with explaining what he does and who he is and then starts with with a good question:
What is the web good for ( or at ).
He further goes on to explain some global things about the user expierience that changed the world. His presentation is spot on, but very broad, meaning that he could give this presentation 5 times a week to different audiences.
link to sheets
Solving the browser problem once and for all.
Molly E. Holschlag
Molly talks about browser development and web standards. Hers was a very nice presentation, which she gave with a lot of passion. I haven't seen her speak in person before and truly liked her style. She is passioned about what she does and I am sorry to hear that she will dissappear from the public speaking platform for awhile.
She in short explains that developing browsers is difficult. We can still blame the vendors for their faults, but we should understand what problems they face. Browsers too have to work with incomplete standards and different user models. They main thing they should do is, in her opinion, to open up to and listen to the community. She explains that only apple with safari is not doing that and strongly asks them to the discussion.
In short, a nice presentation.
link to sheets if available
Nate Koechley
A very good presentation from Yahoo's Nate Koechley about bettering preformance. He talked about some things that we know, but also gave a couple of good obscure examples. Furthermore, he showed us how the browsers don't deal well with cache, so that it is wise to develop for an empty cache user.
The eye opener that he started with though, was that the html load time is only about 5% of the total time. So all that work that goes into database query optimization and more back-end work counts for no more than 5%. 95% is going into scripts, images and stylesheets, so following these points is going to help you a lot.
He build his presentation around 12 pointers that he and his team have found usefull.
- decrease the number of http requests
- combined distribution networks
- setting exparation headers is one to look at..
- gzip your files to reduce bandwidth.
- put css at the top of your documents. use <link> instead of @import.
- put javascript to the bottom, as it stops loading everything else.
- avoid css expressions
- make js and css external
- reduce DNS lookups
- minify Javascript
- avoid redirects
- turn of ETags
link to sheets if available
Dan Cederholm
Dan Cederholm the author of 'bulletproof webdesign' comes back to @media 2007 with a presentation on Interface design Juggling. The presentation compares juggling to the daily activities of a interface designer. He shows a special site he just released for an example: toupeepal, a site of wig wearers, a wig 2.0 site.
He shows that an interface designer basicly juggles with a couple of elements, namely:
- Color
- Typografy
- Favicons
- adding details without adding complexity
- suggest the box
- Reuse and recyle
- microformats
link to sheets if available
Tantek Celik
My second time to see Tantek, who offcourse presents on micoformats. He gives more examples of real world usage, showing that microformats have matured a lot. Last year he spoke of how it should work, now he was (not quite) gloating.
The standard is a good way to mark up several things and is going somewhere. The examples are really good and show how you can use Microformats in your everyday projects. I for one can use them very well at my currect project. And to be honest, marking up anwb in microformats will be pretty cool on my (h)resume.
Joe Clark
This was when fatigue kicked in, after a very long day, I sadly had to leave this one to others. Afterwards I heard that it was quite good and I will read his slides.
Notes are available here
Now this is really good for us real web craftsman and women. Real knowledge of your field once again proves itself against frameworks. How much I loved the demos of jQtouch at last weeks @media ( or #wdx as it is called now ), I still think that using a library or a framework isn't the thing to do for speed. So Ipad and Iphone development will create a new demand for good old hand coders.
