This weekend I attended the London Web Standards group’s State of the Browser, a one-day event with representatives of many of the major browser makers giving us status reports on their products. Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Blackberry were all there; a member of the IE team was due to show but had to pull out for personal reasons (he viewed the live stream and answered some questions from home). The notable absence was Safari, whose community engagement is really not good enough.
There were long talks and shorter breakout sessions, as well as plenty of time to socialise; the LWS must really be congratulated on organising such a good event. There was plenty of news and talking points throughout the day — far too much, really, for me to write here, so I’ll just write up notes of what I found most interesting to me.
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Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.
As is customary (or as customary as ‘twice’ can be), here is a quick round-up of the sessions I attended at @media this year, with links to slides where available (which, as I type this, is pretty much unavailable).
Sessions which I found particularly interesting should be covered in more detail later, and I’ll update here as I find more presentations.
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While I gather my thoughts on @media, a quick mention of the London WSG meeting on Wednesday night, which was on the topic of Findability.
There were three presentations; the first, by Cyril Doussin, introduced the subject and explained the core concepts behind it; the ways in which users find your content (or product) and how you can make it easier for them.
Next, Stuart Colville showed practical ways to make the content on your site more findable, from design through to mark-up, style and behaviour. He raised the interesting point that tagging is better than categorising, as categories tend to be fixed whereas content changes over time as information evolves; time for me to start using WordPress’ tagging function.
Finally, Steve Marshall showed off Yahoo!‘s latest project, Fire Eagle (currently invitation only; I was handed one at @media today), which is a service that lets you update your physical location across multiple sites and services. It’s pretty impressive in theory, but the fact that I can only currently update from the desktop means I am limited to home or work, mostly.
The whole evening was nicely balanced to appeal to a broad range of skills and knowledge, and had the right mix of theory, practice, and showing off. I’m aiming to get more involved in organising future events, and I hope to be part of more quality events like this one.
I intended to write about the WSG meeting and the first day of @media, but drinking socialising networking has occupied my spare time. Still, I got to hear some salacious gossip about well-known characters in the web community, so it was worth it for that alone.
Some interesting stuff about HTML 5 to discuss shortly.
Having missed the opening party, my introduction to London Web Week was last night’s Microformats vEvent. Unfortunately it wasn’t a good introduction, for two reasons;
First (and foremost), it wasn’t really about Microformats. The first speaker talked about RDFa and GRDDL, the second about RDFa and FOAF.
Second, the presumption was that we had an extremely high level of technical knowledge; a presumption that wasn’t true, in my case at least. I’m fairly new to Microformats but I have a pretty good idea of what they’re about; both talks went over my head anyway. And my poor wife, who’s learning about them for the first time, had no idea what was going on.
The description of the event said:
We hope that no matter your experience level, you’ll find the evening informative, enjoyable and inspiring.
I didn’t. In fact, it may well have been counter-productive for me; it took a subject I’m excited about, and made it sound complicated and boring.
I’m sure that some people would have got a lot out of it — the man next to me who’s studying for his pHD in artificial intelligence certainly seemed to enjoy it — but I think the organisers should have been more honest about the technical knowledge required, and saved some attendees a bit of time.
I did get a book for asking a question, however, so it wasn’t a total loss.