In looking back at my posts following Web Essentials 2005 in Sydney, I asked the question, “Who was missing?” In case you didn’t go to that conference, the line-up featured:

• Eric Meyer
• Doug Bowman
• Tantek Celik
• Jeffrey Veen
• Kelly Goto
• Molly Holzschlag
• Derek Featherstone
• John Allsopp

Of the 8 people I thought were possibly “missing”, 4 of them were at Web Directions North 2007. They were:

• Dan Cederholm
• Jeremy Keith
• Dave Shea
• Joe Clark

So, in looking at the list of speakers from this year’s conference, who did I think was missing, or who would I like to see added for next year? This time, the list is pretty short:

• Andy Budd - author of CSS Mastery, which is worth the cover price just to see Cameron Moll’s Sample Site and his explanation behind the various techniques used.
• Steve Krug - author of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, although he is already speaking at some other conference, (damn, that looks good too!)
• Jeff Croft - I’m about two-thirds of the way through his Pro CSS Techniques which, up to this point, covers a lot of the same territory as CSS Mastery and Bulletproof Web Design. The chapters that really look interesting come later, and are about print style sheets and troubleshooting, which aren’t really covered in the other books.

Aside from that, just bring everyone back who was at this year’s conference, expand it to three days, add some more workshops, and I’ll be in web-nirvana!

First of all, on behalf of all the attendees, I want to send out an enormous THANK YOU to John Allsopp, Maxine Sherrin, Derek Featherstone and Dave Shea for bringing an amazing conference to Vancouver, B.C. The presenters were excellent, and my only disappointment was in having to choose between hearing Cameron Moll or Jeremy Keith on Wednesday. (After much deliberation, I chose Cameron.) Please bring the conference back again next year!

Some of the highlights for me were:

• listening to and meeting Dan Cederholm, whose Bulletproof Web Design book is still one of my favorites. I even got him to sign my dog-eared copy.
• hearing Jared Spool live in person (I’ve listened to his podcast from Webmaster Jam several times and loved it. I would have posted a link to it, but it seems to be offline right now. If anyone is interested in hearing it, just let me know and I’ll see what I can do about making the copy I have available.)
• learning more about the design processes used by Veerle Pieters and Dave Shea. (This session was way too short for me!)
• attending the full day workshop by Andy Clarke and Aaron Gustafson, even though a lot of the JavaScript stuff went straight over my head. Much of the material was from Andy’s book Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design which is not only beautiful, but packed with excellent information as well. I’m about three-quarters of the way through it, but I’ll definitely re-read it again once I’m finished. I have a feeling this one will be spending a lot of time on my desk in the coming weeks!

Well, there’s a lot more I could write about the conference, but I’m exhausted, and I want to get this online asap. Thanks again John, Maxine, Derek and Dave, and I hope to see you all again at the next Web Directions North conference, if not sooner.

While Derek’s posts regarding the whole Target fiasco had me thinking about the challenges of usability and accessibility on the web, it became very clear to me this past week that these challenges are ubiquitous in the “real world” as well. The store that really hammered this point home is another multi-million (if not multi-billion) dollar establishment, which pretty much eliminates the excuse of “we can’t afford to fix problem X”. I won’t name them directly, but let’s just say I think their name is Swedish for “wood chips and glue”.

My first unpleasant experience came when I tried to get a cup of coffee. Simple enough self-serve process: just grab a cup, fill it with coffee, add your cream and sugar, stir and go. The first three steps were pretty simple, however stirring my coffee turned out to be quite a challenge. While attempting to properly blend sugar, cream, and hot coffee with a flimsy plastic stir-stick can be a pain at the best of times, the ones provided were too short to reach anywhere near the bottom of the cup. What made this situation even more annoying is that they only offer one size of coffee cup. It wasn’t as though I had mistakenly grabbed a monster soft-drink cup or something.

My second unpleasant experience came when I tried to steer my shopping cart that was full of heavy items. Unlike most carts which have only two wheels that swivel, this one had four. When you’re pushing a cart weighing 100+ pounds, trying to stop it from doing a four-wheel drift into other carts, shoppers, or even walls is literally a pain in the back! If there really is some advantage to be had by having four swivelling wheels instead of two, please let me know, because it is a mystery to me.

The third challenge for me is trying to get to the checkout, after finding whatever it is I want to buy. Most stores have “regular” aisles, and once you find what you’re looking for, you just go to the end of the aisle, visually locate the checkout area, and go there. At this place, you have to either follow the little arrows on the floor (which take you past every single display in the entire store), or you have to navigate the various “hidden shortcuts” from one department to another. I don’t know about you, but when I go shopping, I don’t want to have to solve some real-life Legends of Zelda puzzle just to buy some crappy $4 tealites!

Unfortunately, what these experiences prove to me is that usability and accessibility are far from being mastered in the physical world, so I can only imagine how long it will take for the web to get there.

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted, but that’s because I’ve been extremely busy with work and the family. The holiday season was a blur, much like my one-week visit to Australia for the WE05 conference, but was filled with quality time spent with family, friends, and the occasional good computer book. The latest book to grab and keep my attention is Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model.

Normally, books on coding aren’t the kind that I actually sit down and read, but rather are used as a reference for when I run into a problem. (My most recently opened books for this purpose being the PHP Cookbook and PHP and MySQL Web Development, but I digress.) This one was different. While I still haven’t gone through every line of every example, it had the same effect on me as Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards: that is, it made so much sense as to seem rediculously obvious. While Zeldman’s book made an excellent case for separating content and presentation, and supported it with beautiful code (at least it was back in early ‘03), Keith’s book does the same for separating content, presentation, and behaviour. (For some reason, it’s spelled “behavior” in the book, although Keith is a Brit. Was that because of the publisher being American?)

While I still don’t feel I have enough knowledge to tackle a significant JavaScript project just yet, (at least not as cleanly as I’d like,) I didn’t feel that I knew as much about CSS as I’d like after reading Zeldman’s book either. Hopefully I’ll either learn as much about JavaScript as I have about CSS over the next three years, or I’ll be able to find an affordable JavaScript coder-for-hire that can write code as beautifully as Keith does. (Any takers?)

I really hope Keith’s book is a big success: not just in sales, but in influence as well. I think it has the potential to lead a big wave of JavaScript books that focus on separating behaviour from structure, progressive enhancement, and graceful degredation (AKA Unobtrusive JavaScript). While the number of quality CSS books in my personal library is in double-digits, I have only one (but possibly two) quality JavaScript books: Keith’s, and Stuart Langridge’s DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM, which I haven’t read yet. (A potential third, The JavaScript Anthology by Cameron Adams and James Edwards, better known as “The Man In Blue” and “Brothercake” respectively, is already on order. And I heard a rumour about a potential fourth, as Derek Featherstone is apparently “exploring opportunities.”)

Is Keith going to be JavaScript’s equivalent to Eric Meyer? I’m not sure, but I really think the “Unobtrusive JavaScript Movement” (if I can call it that) needs someone or some group to play that role of teacher, sage and mentor. Maybe if he can match Meyer’s prolific one-great-book-per-year output he’ll attain that status, but for now that position remains open.

Well, that’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll find the time to write more often. Even if nobody reads this stuff the act of writing seems oddly therapeutic!

After reflecting on what was an amazing conference, I came to the realization that the Web Essentials organizing group have a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in topping the presenters from WE05. The only people I could immediately think of as possibly “missing” were presenters at WE04: Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea and Joe Clark (and yes, those last two are fellow Canucks). However, after a quick look through my library of computer books, and at a few books that never leave my desk, a few other names came to mind:

• Dan Cederholm - of SimpleBits fame, and whose latest book Bulletproof Web Design hasn’t left my desk since I bought it,
• Steve Krug - author of Don’t Make Me Think whose writing (and speaking, I’d presume) I’d much rather absorb than that other guy’s,
• John McWade - of Before and After,
• Brendon Sinclair - author of The Web Design Business Kit from SitePoint, which, even though I haven’t finished reading it all yet, has given me some excellent ideas,
• Jeremy Keith - author of DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model which I am anxiously awaiting delivery of.

Obviously, my list is geared towards my areas of interest: mainly CSS and design, with a bit if business info and quality JavaScript thrown in for good measure. Can you think of any authors, speakers, designers that should be added?

WE05:

Even though I had the “Journey from Hell” getting there, including multiple flight delays, unexpected stopovers, missed flights and in-flight meals (maybe that was a good thing?) mad-dashes to make connecting flights, and, of course, lost luggage, making the trek from Vancouver Canada to Sydney Australia for the Web Essentials 2005 conference was definitely worth it. The featured presenters: Eric Meyer, Doug Bowman, Tantek Çelik, Jeff Veen, Kelly Goto, Molly Holzschlag - a real who’s who of the web world. Lots of smart people doing amazing things.

Here’s a few random thoughts from the conference:

• if Jeffrey Veen and Kelly Goto procreated, there would be a new master-race of incredibly bright, energetic and creative people that didn’t need any sleep;
• I thought Canadians could drink, but you Aussies were scarily impressive;
• if I lived in Australia, I could probably live on nothing but Flat Whites and pies;
• I don’t know how WE06 could possibly top this year’s lineup;
• I’d love to be able to hire Doug Bowman, Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik to design/create/build anything they wanted to, because I know whatever they came up with would be incredible;
• I’m going to have to start saving now to be able to attend in ‘06!

To all the organizers of the conference, Well Done! and I hope to be able to attend again next year.
To both of you reading this, thanks, Mom, for helping look after the kids, and to my lovely wife, no, I didn’t get drunk once!

Well, a few of the people I spoke with at WE05 were shocked and dismayed that I didn’t have a blog, so here goes. I’m still getting over jet-lag and general exhaustion from the long flights and flurry of activity, so this will be a short one (if it ever goes online, that is).

The event was great, there were lots of smart people there, I love Australia (and Sydney in particular), and I can’t wait to go back.

Bye for now…