ivantohelpyou

Eric Meyer started the event with a presentation titled “Secrets of the CSS Jedi.” From the beginning, I was a bit cautious. From what I recall, in order to become a Jedi you have to fly to some swampy planet to face down your innermost fears, where if you leave before graduation you’re at risk of succumbing to [deep voice] THE DARK SIDE.

As much as I like the idea of web standards, if everyone on a Web design team has to visit a swamp to learn from a wizened Muppet, it will never sell in the corporate world. Companies don’t need standardization in results. They need standardization in training and equipment. Everyone wearing the same white helmets and body armor, marching in formation, blasters at the ready.

In Eric’s example, he was able to take an HTML page containing a few columns of numbers and then, almost entirely using CSS, he turned it into a vertical bar graph. The process took in the neighborhood of 70 to 100 lines of code. He then showed another version, also hand-coded, with a horizontal bar graph. Now what would it take to make a bar graph using Adobe Flex 2 with Charting or some other non-standard Web framework? Just a few lines of code, once you’re up and running. And if you wanted to turn it into a pie chart or plot it on a logarithmic scale? Change a parameter and you’re done.

So, which approach should the average Web designer choose: The theoretically pure approach with a steep learning curve but impeccable results, or the toolkit-framework approach that gets the job done at the expense of semantic clarity? Or is there a middle ground?

Jeffrey Zeldman spoke well about the importance of good copy, with many illuminating examples. One such example: Basecamp, which instead of prompting for "login," contains the prompt text: "Please log in first and then we'll send you right along." This enhances the brand image as a "fun and easy" tool to handle the "tedious, frustrating and miserable" task of project management. But one audience member pointed out that Basecamp operates as a private label service – in other words, if I want to use Basecamp to manage projects with my clients, I send them to ivantohelpyou.seework.com. Clients see my logo, but with Basecamp's "fun and easy" text. That’s nice, but what if someone wanted the login prompt to say, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" or some other inspirational quote? Not so easy to do with a hosted service. Which means that the insufferably perky 37 Signals philosophy goes viral along with its software.

Jason Santa Maria went through design stuff while I answered client e-mails. I only caught a small segment involving dancing leprechauns.

Steve Krug promoted the concept of usability testing, including demos of how to use Camtasia and Morae from Techsmith. He may have also mentioned something about a book.

Andrew Kirkpatrick from Adobe spoke about accessibility. It was very code-heavy. My mind started wandering, and I started to wonder whether it would be possible to convert HTML to MIDI, so that a web page could be converted into a catchy tune with lyrics describing the content, and the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns describing the structure and behavior of the site. You’d load a webpage, and the music of the spheres would fill the room; you’d say "pow!" on the downbeat to activate a link, and the music would segue into something new, something wonderful. If you saw me there, my eyes were closed so that I might have some sense of what it would be like to be blind; and if you saw me drooling into a puddle on the hotel banquet table, that was me simulating loss of muscle control. And that smell…never mind.

Dan Cederholm also spoke last month at WebDirections North, at a session devoted to microformats. This time, he spoke about color schemes, typography and favicons before repeating the pitch on microformats. But I wasn’t bored by the repetition – first, it’s an interesting subject, and second, it gave me a chance to listen to how he was saying it rather than what he was saying. He’s an effective speaker, taking what could be a dry topic and relating it in a just-folks, non-techie manner. Yeah, right, he doesn't remember what API stands for. And I think that IPO stands for India Pale Oil.

From my perspective, the main problem with microformats is that I’m too lazy to add them to posts like this one. Sure, it’s easy. But it means that I’d have to go through this very entry and mark-up at least six entries with hCard information, and it has been quite enough effort for me to do this write-up of day one. Maybe if ivantohelpyou gets an editorial assistant, I’d be on board with it. Until then, sweet dreams.

Labels: ALA, blogging, NV07, Web 2.0, web design, Web Standards