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@media: A personal perspective

This is probably going to be quite a lengthy entry, as I want to talk about both the event itself, the seminars and sessions; and also the evening events and social meet-and-greet stuff (I should also apologise to Adam Howell in advance – warning, may contain references to “gurus”). ;)

I’m also going to try to commit some of my thoughts on the organisation and future potential of @media to paper screen database before I forget them.

Day One (day)

Having attended many conferences, seminars and exhibitions, the first thing that impressed me when I arrived at the venue (a stone’s throw from the South Bank, and just round the corner from the Richard & Judy studios!) was the overall professionalism and class of the organisation.

If I’m honest I was expecting it to be more of a haphazard affair, being that it was the first one and organised by web designers, but from the very first moment it was as slick and polished as much bigger organisations’ events. A free @media-branded bag waited for every attendee (or were we delegates?), and after collecting our name badges (also very swish) we were ushered upstairs for refreshments before the first session.

After a long journey, one often has need to visit the facilities; unfortunately I wasn’t alone in this, but I did find myself standing in the lengthy queue for the toilets (no urinals – what was up with that??) next to a certain Mr Jon Hicks. He described himself as approachable before the conference, although I’m not entirely sure whether he envisaged the gents toilets as a suitable location to be approached, but he took it in good spirit and invited me upstairs to meet the rest of the Brit Pack.

On the way, the American contingent arrived and joined us, so before 9am I had already shaken hands with Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Simon Collison and Doug Bowman – my “I Spy Gurus” book was coming along nicely.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s keynote on the birth of web standards went down well, and as the day progressed the presentations delved further into standards, design and accessibility (more on the actual content later). The timings were expertly handled by the compere (even though he did rather unfortunately refer to Robin Christopherson’s presentation on screen readers – Robin is blind – as “a real eye-opener”).

During the break and lunch I met up with the Accessify Forum contingent – Jon ‘Dotjay’ Gibbins, Patrick ‘Redux’ Lauke, Andy Saxton – and many others, including Alex Armstrong, Rob Whiting (does he have a blog?), Peter J Lambert, Karl, and Kate Bolin.

Day One (evening)

After the last presentation from Ian Lloyd of Accessify, we repaired en masse to the venue for the @media party, where free beer and extremely hot food awaited. After chatting at length to Andy Clarke, who was eager to hear what everyone thought of the conference so far, and having my ear bent by Ian Lloyd about his current lack of internet connection (every geek’s worst nightmare), I decided that organisation was called for if we were going to eat enough food to soak up all the alcohol so that we could function tomorrow.

Several abortive attempts to leave later (all caused, it has to be said, by Jon Hicks vanishing into thin air), twenty of us headed off in search of a restaurant that could accommodate a score of hungry standardistas. We had also been joined at that point by Jon, Patrick, Alex, Kate, Jeremy Keith, Peter Paul Koch, Doug Bowman, Ian Lloyd and Derek Featherstone – the latter keen to demonstrate his impressive array of bar tricks.

Eventually an excellent chinese was found (right opposite my hotel, conveniently), and much food and discussion was had. Memorable moments included:

• Derek apparently trying to destroy his fork while discussing accessibility testing
• Derek (again) trying to attach a beer glass to his head

• Doug demonstrating how to do party tricks with a napkin for Ian Lloyd
• Doug exclaiming “YOU’RE Peter Paul Koch?!” when he discovered who he had been sitting next to for the last twenty minutes
• Jeremy Keith failing to keep the speakers’ secret word gag a secret for very long

After settling up the bill, we headed back to the bar just in time to catch the final song of the night, accompanied by a few last hardcore dancers, but by this time my early morning had caught up with me, so I made my excuses and was in bed by midnight.

Day Two

Presentations on the second day came from Doug, Joe Clark, Jeremy, Molly, Derek and Andy Clarke; the secret word gag seemed to be getting out of control by the time Andy delivered the last talk of the day (his old art teacher, “Dai Dactic”, would have been proud). The silly mood seemed to be catching though, as Peter J Lambert later remarked that the food had been an excellent table-based layout…

The day finished with a prepared Q&A session, although it eventually deviated from the script as there were so many issues that people in the audience wanted to discuss. Joe Clark proved to be a deadpan comedy genius, remarking to one questioner who asked about the exorbitant cost of retro-fitting a large website for standards and accessibility, “If it would cost $10m to fix, you must be using Vignette”.

The after-party was slightly more low-key than the previous night; I met Denis Radenkovic (who seemed to be the only man there drinking wine), chatted again to Andy Clarke about the direction the conference may take next year, and managed to start a heated discussion about chavs and racism with someone who may or may not have been Ben Dursley (although Google tells me there’s no such person, so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name) Ben Darlow.

As work would not have been happy with two nights on the hotel bill (and my wife would have been even less happy), I left early and caught the train back home with recent proud father Peter Lambert – you won’t know this if you don’t have any, but kids are much more interesting to talk about than web standards…

Tell me something I don’t know

It was a sentiment that I heard expressed by the vast majority of the people that I spoke to – the event is great, but the presentations are old news; I haven’t learned anything. I don’t know whether my perception is perhaps skewed due to the circles I was moving in – mostly standards-based bloggers – there may well have been attendees to whom most of the information was of use (although judging by the show of hands at the start of Andy Budd’s presentation on table-less design, any one of us could have given the same talk), but I think on the whole that the presentation content was pitched way too low for its audience.

It may just be symptomatic of the insular world (blogosphere, I suppose) that we live in; the event was well-publicised via standards blogs and sites, and inevitably many of the attendees came to see in person the writers they admire, with the effect that you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a CSS or accessibility expert.

Jeremy Keith’s DOM-scripting presentation seemed to go down the best, probably due to the relative newness of the subject to many developers (and the difficulty of learning DOM-based Javascript compared to CSS), but it too barely scratched the surface of a complex and, to me, very interesting subject.

Personally, the most interesting presentations were the demonstration of screen-reader usage by Robin – like many developers, I am well-aware of the coding practices one must use to help screen-reader users, but I have no experience actually using one, so hearing it projected through the loudspeakers as it struggled through multiple badly-named images was very revealing and food for thought – and Doug Bowman’s two presentations. Doug is a fantastic public speaker and had developed two excellent presentations on CSS and practical usage; his naming conventions in particular is something I will definitely be implementing on my next project.

Looking ahead

So what of @media 2006? Well, I think that there are several things that need to happen to make the experience more valuable:

• More presentations, on a wider range of subjects: As noted above, the breadth and depth of the subject matter discussed was very limited, although certainly of use to some portion of the audience. I would like to see two or even three different auditoriums next year (perhaps for Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced?), covering a much wider range of subjects in a great deal more depth. Complex DOM-scripting, AJAX, accessible Flash development, mobile device design – all these subjects would be of interest to many of the attendees.
• Hands-on workshops: In addition to the presentations, some practical workshops would be great.
• More design: I know it doesn’t quite fall under the banner of web standards and accessibility, but pure design subjects such as layout, flow and typography would also be popular.
• Less insular: I don’t know how the event was publicised, but it was evident from the audience make-up that most presenters were preaching to the converted. We need to encourage more uninitiated designers to enter the web standards fold, although I don’t have any ideas on how this is going to be achieved.

Overall though, Patrick Griffiths has done a phenomenal job in the organisation and execution of the first web standards event in Europe, and I look forward to attending next year.

Where were you, then?

People who I wanted to meet but didn’t:

• Stephane Deschamps
• Roger Johansson
• Mark Boulton

Photos

All photos linked above are in my @media Flickr Set (slideshow).

If you have photos taken at @media, please link to them from the @media2005 Flickr Group. Ithangyew.

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