Web Directions Day 1
FEB 8th 2007 • 0 Comments
Yesterday was the first day of events. I've had a great time so far and I can't wait for today's events to get started. I'm especially looking forward to Dave Shea's and Veerle Pieter's keynote.
Crimes Against Web Standards
The first keynote was by Molly Holzschlag. She provided an interesting look at the history of web design and the horrible practices of web designers for all those years before CSS really took off. 10 deep nested table, hundreds of duplicate external stylesheets, break tags for spacing, and the list goes on. It was very fascinating to see how far designing for the web has come in just the past 3-4 years.
Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui
This was a very fascinating look at how to maintain accessibility with AJAX. One solution is to always provide an alternative functionality should javascript not be enabled. Essentially, make sure that the document downgrades gracefully. This is easily done with simple web documents that are simply enhanced with AJAX.
I think this is definitely what we should shoot for, but It's also clear that the industry is moving towards greater and greater complexity in web applications. Thanks mostly in part to Google. Making a complex web application that utilizes AJAX completely accessible is unfortunately unrealistic.
Transcendent Design with Javascript and CSS
This was a very interesting keynote by Andy Clarke and Aaron Gustafson. They provided an interesting look at the future of CSS in CSS3. Technologies like adding flash to a website with CSS, and creating newspaper like columns. None of what was seen will be practical for many more years, due to the slow acceptance of new web technologies. But it was fascinating to see what the future may hold. Andy's book is definitely on my wishlist, it looks amazing.
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