On Monday, December 5th, I attended An Event Apart in Philadelphia (along with some of my co-workers, Joe, Dan and John). I thought it was quite useful: we had Eric Meyer talking to us about CSS and HTML (read his after event thoughts), Jeffrey Zeldman on content, branding, and Jason Santa Maria on design (read his thoughts on the event). They used real-world examples and attendee submitted sites: breaking them apart from both design and code perspectives and also covered the redesign of the A List Apart site.

The audience seemed about evenly split between those on the coding side and those on the design side (though I’m sure there were many wearing multiple hats). There were a few evil content writers/managers types mixed in, too. All in all, there were a little over one hundred of us, packed into a room that probably should have been a little bigger.

First, the good: the pacing seemed mostly fine. All the speakers were knowledgeable and funny. Normally at these types of affairs, I find myself either drifting off to sleep, or doodling/working. Not here: I felt engaged at all times. I also liked the interplay between the speakers and the attempt to show the process from design to final CSS tweaking. And I found Eric to be quite similar in attitude to myself and other code-monkeys. I really liked Eric’s presentation on the totally em-based design, while at the same time wonder if attempting to correct browser failures with CSS and JavaScript are very productive.

However, I also felt that the conference could have been much more useful if there were separate “tracks,” one for the more code oriented folk and another for the design people. It felt weird to have Eric idle when Jeffrey was talking and vice-versa. It would have been really great to have that time to ambush Eric with some difficult CSS issues, for example. Or to pin down Jeffrey on some accessibility questions while Eric talked about CSS. Having two tracks would allow both Eric and Jeffrey to be fully utilized.

I’m also glad I didn’t bring my laptop, since the Wi-Fi access was spotty at best (I was just looking over at Joe’s screen, anyhow). Folks were uploading pictures to Flickr when the connection worked. Parts of me show up here and there, despite my best intentions to remain unphotographed.

I think there were probably many of us who wanted to go into a lot more depth on CSS issues (just as I’m sure some of the more design-oriented types might have wanted more of Jason’s design thoughts). So I think there was a missed opportunity in there. And there was nearly nothing said about semantic XHTML: I’d have liked an hour or so on that topic.

Then there were the “freebies.” I always like freebies. :) Each attendee got a T-Shirt and a random book from New Riders. It would have been nice to be able to choose the book you received, but folks were trading (wouldn’t have helped me much, since I think I probably own them all already). And I won a year of free hosting (just have to figure out what to do with it).

Overall, though, I was quite pleased.

Technorati Tags: css, An Event Apart

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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