Today I had the privilege to participate in my first ever web convention, and what a convention it was.
If this were a Hollywood movie the cast would consist nothing but top actors in the business, think Pulp Fiction without the guns, swearing, sex and violence but with lots of insightful thoughts and ideas on how to develop better websites. In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t like Pulp Fiction, but the quality was definitely there.
To kick things off we started with Kimberly Blessing who fed us a bit of background of the browser history, what the current IE6 limitations are, and all the main workarounds. I was surprised at how incredibly simple she kept it, and I can’t think of anyone who could have given a more down-to-earth explanation of how to handle all the quirks and bugs of the then baptized “the browser we all love to hate”.
(forgive me if I get the order of the presentations wrong from hereon)
Secondly we had someone with the name of a real actress, Nicole Sullivan who brought what was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting presentations in CSS Summit. She talked to us about a new CSS or methodology called “Object Oriented CSS” that consists of not only some generalized rules that allow us to make grid-based layouts very quickly but help reduce the size of our CSS files, therefore increasing the speed of our websites.
Without much prancing much around the topic, Nicole jumped right into the action, and showered us with ways, tips, and insights on how to optimize our code and make it efficient whether our sites are small or will end up scaling in the future. Whether it was a module’s styling, a site’s layout, Nicole nailed every topic without much opposition from anyone.
Up next we had someone who was baptized the Chuck Norris of CSS, Dave McFarland who explained which CSS 2.1 and 3.0 selectors/properties we can use today that don’t diminish our sites’ quality and provide progressive enhancement. He also showed some techniques to give some old browsers the similar or same advanced CSS functionalities, including some very long and scary IE filters that made most spectators run around with their hands on their heads.
Christopher’s presentation was unfortunately adjourned due to some technical difficulties but fortunately Nicole was able to make good use of that time to finish her very long, but very interesting, presentation.
After the lunch break, the Summit restarted with Jason Teague who gave a thorough explanation of how many fonts there are normally available at any system, and the number of fonts available that most people can use without the need of some embedding technique like sIFR or Cufon. I was surprised to hear that just by having Office installed on our computers (which most people do), we have over 100 fonts we can “safely” use on both Mac and Windows.
We were also given some hindsight of what the current state of where web typography is at and what the problems were, and unfortunately this is yet another one of those cases where the use of a great web technology that we already have is being pushed back due to license agreements.
Zoe Gillenwater was up next and gave one of the best presentations of the summit, which was all about making liquid and elastic CSS layouts on the web. I think it’s safe to say that most people look at liquid layouts in an ill way. Personally, I usually stay away from them because of that rule that was hammered to my head very early on when I first start coding websites, that each line of text shouldn’t have much more than X number of words per-line.
What Zoe’s presentation showed me was that not only was it possible to follow the X to Y number of words-per-line rule, but that it was also possible to scale parts of a design according to the text size so things stay in proportion, but also scale the width of the layout according to the width of the browser window. Obviously this presents some problems for sites with a lot of images, but thankfully Zoe covered some ways of handling that, and Stephanie followed up on that a bit later.
Speaking of which, Stephanie Sullivan’s presentation was up next and it was basically like a CSS band camp. By being by far the most practical of all the presentations it only suffered because of the presentation software’s limitations, which sometimes refused to refresh what was being displayed.
Stephanie’s presentation consisted of showing us a bit of her skills as a web trainer. And in a dream world, we’d have a lot of classes similar to the presentation she gave for people who want to learn to make websites, and need to learn some basic tips and tricks.
And last, but certainly not least was Molly Holzschlag, who adequately finished the summit with who’s what’s and why’s of CSS, and the tools we have today and will have tomorrow to make modern web applications. If she happens to come across this tiny little blog of mine, I’d like to wish her a nice “get well soon”.
I’d like to thank once again all the people who organized the summit, for without it I probably wouldn’t have ever had the opportunity to attend something like this, and certainly not with such an A-class list of people.
I also appreciated the fact that things were kept simple enough for newcomers, but also had some deeper insight on all subjects for the most tech-savvy viewers. I think that regardless of the expertise each viewer had, we were all able to walk away with good knowledge.
I was also surprised with some of the people attending the conferences, including one of my design “heroes” ninjas Lim Chee Aun who created the very popular Phoenity icons, and also the team, or someone from Sapo, which is one of the largest portuguese web companies (think the Portuguese Yahoo).
So this is it, and I look forward to seeing more event like this in the future and maybe one day have one of those “geek-out” sessions with Christopher, and some drinks with the rest of the speakers in a “real world” presentation.
Glad to hear you had a good time — and SO sorry I could only get through 3/4 of my preso. DinDin had some issues.
Maybe next time we can use Adobe Connect (which is much better behaved). 
Happy coding!
I’m happy to hear you liked my preso, and that it opened your eyes to some of the possibilities of flexible layouts. Hope it helps you in your work!