My @media2005 report.

Sorry for the delay on my write up for @media2005…. Better late then never hey.
Firstly I would like to thank Patrick Griffiths for organising the whole event. I have been hoping for this event for a long time now. It certainly was a job well done.

The event was packed out with web peeps from all over Europe. I was impressed and surprised with how far people had come for the show. It was nice to be with such a diverse crowd that all shared the same struggles, views and hair pulling experiences of web work. I think there were only about 15-20% ladies in the audience, where are all us girls in the web world? But I was glad to meet some of you finally.

I did really take a lot from the 2 days, although some people I spoke to and I agreed in principle was that most of the presentations were “preaching to the converted”. However this was the first one of its kind in Europe, so I guess it must have been hard to predict who the audience was going to be. I felt on the second day the presenters realised this and the content was a little more information packed. I am sure the next one will be different and reflect the audience a lot better.

However I think we all needed some preaching as we all felt like we have been working in the dark. I for one and know others who felt very reassured that what we have all been doing is correct and please keep doing it!

I really enjoyed listening to Jeffrey Zeldman speak about how the Web Standards came to life. I don’t get much time to read half as much as I would like to on the web and I never knew the nice Story he told about how hard people have worked to get where we are today. You can read some info on web standards here: http://www.webstandards.org/about/

There was a nice balance of CSS goodness and Accessibility chat. It was superb to catch a glimpse of how Douglas Bowman, Andy Budd and Patrick Griffiths work with CSS. I would have liked to spend a whole day with each of them listening and discussing more about layout challenges and structuring the content correctly.

It was reassuring to also hear that screen readers are not easy to use! I learnt a lot about how I can test for accessibility and that getting AAA compliance is almost impossible! [I said almost!] There is certainly no excuse for ignorance on this topic because there are lots of simple steps you can take to make life easier for someone with a screen reader, a visual impairment or browsing in a different situation. I also now feel I can appreciate more why it is important to take the smaller audience of disabled people into consideration. Thanks to Derek Featherstone, Robin Christopherson, Joe Clark and Ian Lloyd for the Accessibility talks.

Finally, a female steps onto the stage - Molly E. Holzschlag Good to see that the web domain is not dominated 100% by men. Molly was fab on looking at the whole web standards cake. [Congrats to Molly for getting the word "masturbatory" in there! If I had not seen the "A Little WordPl@y" joke I still would have been impressed that Molly used that word in correct context in her presentation!]

For the first time ever someone was telling me JavaScript is good!! Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom. I was under the impression it should not be used if you want to stay on side of the web law. However just as you separate content from presentation, just add another layer to the cake and you have a behaviour layer! [Lots of discussions on cakes and trifles, you know what I mean if you were there.] Why not use JavaScript in your web pages as long as it can still function without it and is kept in its own entity then it’s ok. Jeremy Keith really hit the nail on the head and I am hoping to see more on the subject.

To round the 2 days of strict web talk we were privileged to a revitalizing presentation from the geezer Andy Clarke. [who is now top on my list for web inspiration, thanks!] Andy scrapped his initial scheduled presentation of Anatomy of a mouse in exchange of getting your creative web juices flowing! It was spot on to hear someone talk about the real world trade offs that just have to be made and sometimes in sacrifice of accessibility. By all means he is in support of web standards. Andy just brought to light that we must not be confined by them, we still need to innovate. This just helped me think about how many design problems are yet to be confront and challenge. Which is not a bad thing; because it’s fun solving these problems as a designer.

I think I could keep writing about the experience of @media2005 but I think I will stop there and now link to what presentations are online for you to go and have a look at.
Thanks again! – Roll on @media2006!

Derek Featherstone - http://www.boxofchocolates.ca/atmedia2005/
Andy Clarke - http://www.malarkey.co.uk/downloads.aspx
Jeremy Keith - http://www.adactio.com/atmedia2005/
Andy Budd - http://www.andybudd.com/@media2005/
Jeffrey Zeldman - http://www.happycog.com/clients/atmedia05/
-I’ll add more as I get the links.