Article

@media 2006 thoughts:

I really enjoyed @media 2006, I had a really hard time deciding which talks to go to. I did find some of the content a little light weight, but there were a couple of sessions which I got a lot from.

The general themes of the conference where well captured in the final panel. Although the Web Standards battle continues most leading designers\developers are now moving on. Looking forward the panel thought that open data, Microformats and mashups where going to make the biggest impact.

It was hard to miss the strength of the Microformats message. I agree with Jeremy Keith’s recent post Microformats are at a tipping point. The web standards movement has championed the importance of semantic structure to a whole generation of designers\developers. Microformats seem like the next logical step, their simplicity is beguiling. Real world examples are starting to blossom with Technorati Search, Yahoo! (cc) search and Tails extension for Firefox.

Jeff Veen did a fantastic talk about designing web applications around participation, trust and improving the user experience. He quite cleverly side-stepped the whole Web 2.0 hype debate by just concentrating his talk on the benefits of good information and interaction design. The points that most stood out where:

  • Treat users as peers
  • Let users control their own data
  • Actions should be without cost, build undo’s and back steps
  • Build a architecture of participation
  • Your site is just one piece of a bigger picture
  • Let the user experience build the navigational architecture

With the introduction of richer user experience and interaction, DOM Scripting was a major part of the conference. Nate Koechley gave a interesting insight into the development of three Yahoo products, contrasting the different approaches taken.

Yahoo are about to release a new version of their home page. It will contain a lot of interactive elements and on-demand loading of content. In the future this redesign could be seen as a turning point for the uptake of  AJAX/DOM Scripting, much as the CSS redesign of Wired is now considered a defining moment for Web Standards. This is not because of the quality of the design, but more that such a large commercial site is backing the technology.

Jeremy Keith’s talk on using DOM Scripting to plug the holes in CSS was great. Although I completely agree with the use of unobtrusive JavaScript, I do wish that those evangelising DOM Scripting would spend some time addressing the onload issue.

Most of the speakers and panellists believed that there would be little technical development in HTML layout until CSS3 apart from the introduction of IE7. Andy Clarke’s talk tryed to direct designers to look out from the web for inspiration and make web design less self-referential.

It was great to meet lots of people at the socials Chris Heilmann, James Edwards, Ian Lloyd Dan Cederholm and many more. Had some great discussions and a few too many beers.

Useful links

Slides

@Media2006 Notes from muffin research

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