Web Essentials 05 Conference WE05
We’ve been attending the Web Essentials 05 Conference in Sydney for the past few days - September 29 and 30th.
There was a great line up of web standards illuminaries - Doug Bowman (who also spoke at WE04), Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, Tantek Çelik, Jeffrey Veen and many others. It was great to actually meet many of the people whose writings, ideas, and skills have influenced the devopment of web standards, and changed the way many of us work.
Tantek - who I first encounted through his ‘Box Model hack’ - told attendees the story of how he came up with this famous CSS hack - and how it really didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Of course - by fudging widths which allowed IE 5 to actually display CSS designs correctly - it was a breakthrough which made CSS design a viable option from a mass market browser perspective. I had first used Tantek’s box model hack on a tableless, all CSS site design which went live back in late January 2002.
I even bought a brand new copy of the 2nd edition of Eric Meyer’s ‘Cascading Style Sheets - The Definitive Guide’ to get Eric to autograph - I was too embarrassed to ask him to sign my now dog-eared, coffee stained, highlighter pen marked, post-it-note ‘tabbed’ copy of the earlier edition of his book….
Eric’s presentations were just fantastic. His presentation on ‘rapid design prototyping using standards’ was a real eye opener!
There are Podcasts of many of the presentations from WE05 now available for anyone who didn’t attend.
Thanks again to Russ, Peter, Maxine and John for bringing so many great international speakers to Sydney for another terrific Web Standards conference!
