@Media Day One – thoughts

For the Thursday, these are the presentations I saw…

• Jesse James Garrett : Beyond Ajax
• Molly E. Holzschlag : Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem
• Nate Koechly : High Performance Web Pages
• Dan Cederholm : Interface Design Juggling
• Mark Boulton : Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
• Joe Clark : When Accessibility Is Not Your Problem

*Clicky* on the ‘more’ link to see what I thought…

So – my thoughts :

• The keynote speech by Jesse James Garrett was interesting – Garrett was the guy who coined the word “Ajax”, as well as “Blog”, so he knows what he’s talking about. The basic premise of the keynote speech was about taking site design (and the design of web applications etc.) and reversing the method, starting off with an interface, an idea, an end-product, and working backwards from there, making the technology work within the interface, rather than making the interface fit the technology.

  For me, the main lingering concept from the speech was that while techies and developers think in terms of the underlying technology, and how to get things to work, the end user just sees the interface – and anything under that is just “magic”. So long as the “magic” works, the user is happy, and doesn’t care (and shouldn’t have to care) what’s going on under the hood.

• Molly Holzschlag’s section was about the problems inherent in the software of web browsers, rather than websites. It was interesting, and showed up a lot of the reasons why websites look so different on different browsers. While it wasn’t really rocket science, I could see plenty of people around me coming to sudden realisations – that great “Ahhhhhhhh” moment where something clicks in your head, and which seems to happen so often at @Media.

  It was also interesting to see the way Molly is moving on – she’s been a fairly long-term fixture at conferences like this, but she’s moving away from the speaking circuit- (Lectures? Seminars? Presentations? What the hell do I call them?) in fact, @Media was one of her last presentations – and going to work more on getting all the main browser developers to talk together, and estalish some standards between themselves. That‘s something that’ll be interesting to follow over the next few years…

• Over the last few years, Yahoo! has been doing a lot of work on tuning up their website and servers to deliver the best possible performance, and that was the basis for Nate Koechly’s session. It made for interesting thoughts, along with balancing out the necessary work (for example, dealing with IT departments in some cases in order to set up Expiry Headers) with the relevant benefits.

  As with so many things, I generally already do a fair number of Koechly/Yahoo!’s suggestions – not using @import for CSS files, minimising the number of HTTP requests and GZipping files, for example – but there are several with which I just can’t be arsed. CSS Sprites are, for the most part, a pain in the arse, (although I can see they’d be useful in some circumstances) setting Expiry headers is (as I’ve already alluded) a bundle of hassle, and minimising files (taking out as much white space as possible) is OK so long as it’s only done to a sane level. Yes, I can ram all the spaces etc. out of my CSS file, but only at risk of making it utterly unreadable later on.

  All told, again a lot of good ideas, coupled with a few that (to me) just aren’t worth the hassle. But it made for some thought-provoking things, with my colleagues all saying “Well, we can do a/b/c easily”, so that’s a good result.

• I’ve seen other sessions by Dan Cederholm, and he’s someone whose design skills I envy. The work he’s done on things like Corkd is always simple when analysed, but makes a site look smooth, smart, and sophisticated. (Well, in my opinion anyway) So seeing him talk about the way he designs, and the inspirations for what he does, well, that was always going to be a winner for me.

  Cederholm talked about using minimal palettes, and keeping design elements consistent across the interface – a background image might be re-used (sparingly) in three places, and the colour scheme is simple, but versatile. To me it’s what site design is about – although I never really manage it – but this session definitely presented me with more ideas about how to do what I want on sites with regard to their design.

• Typography is one of those things that I love to look at, and see a beautifully designed site. But it’s also one of those things I never really get – or at least I didn’t until this session. Mark Boulton managed to even make the maths of ’em’s sane and understandable, along with a decent explanation of grid layout and the like. I fully expect to be making a lot of use of the things described here over the next few months.

  For me, this session was one of my real “Ahhhh moments”, and all the better for it. Simple stuff – the designers I was talking to afterwards said it was a bit simplistic for anyone who comes from a print background- but to me it made sense, and will have major results and improvements in the future.

• And finally, Joe Clark’s “When Accessibility Is Not Your Problem”. Hmmm. This one had both good and bad bits – and while I agree with a lot of what was said, I can also see that too many people will have taken away the big headings, and not listened to the small print. For instance, while I agree that all web browsers should make it simple to resize text, the simple fact is that the two browsers with the largest percentages of users ( IE 6 and 7) don’t. Yes, you can do it to some degree, but it’s not great, and doesn’t work properly. To say “That’s not my problem, it’s Microsoft’s” is great in princile, if a user can’t change to a decent browser, saying “it’s not my problem” is just going to piss them off.

  A lot of the session made sense, but like I said, I can see it being misinterpreted all too easily. And that’s a bad thing.

Overall, a great day, with plenty of ideas, some decent speakers, and some thought-provoking (and discussion-provoking stuff to take with me and think about over the coming months.