{"id":151,"date":"2007-09-30T14:34:49","date_gmt":"2007-09-30T14:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/2007\/09\/web-directions-south-2007"},"modified":"2013-09-07T16:42:51","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T16:42:51","slug":"web-directions-south-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/2007\/09\/web-directions-south-2007","title":{"rendered":"Web Directions South 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

Web Directions South 2007<\/a> was held last week and it was awesome!<\/p>\r\n

On Wednesday, I attended the W3C\r\n\t\tSpecial Interest Group<\/a>, featuring presentations\r\n\tfrom a variety of people on topics including CSS, HTML, Widgets, SVG and\r\n\t\tRDF. Bert Bos discussed the status of CSS and explained some of the new\r\n\t\tfeatures that are being introduced into CSS3. In particular, the layout\r\n\t\tand grid positioning features were the most exciting, since they will make\r\n\t\tit significantly easier to layout web pages. Marcos Caceres gave an overview\r\n\t\tof the work he and Anne have been doing for the Widgets specification in the\r\n\t\tWeb API WG, and Chris Wilson talked about the progress of the HTMLWG\r\n<\/p>\r\n

There were also some presentations on some topics of which I am not a huge\r\n\tfan. RDF, OWL and other \u201cSemantic Web\u201d nonsense seemed to be given a lot of\r\n\temphasis in a few of the talks. Personally, I think those and related specs\r\n\tare over-engineered, ivory tower specs that were developed in the hope that\r\n\tsome \u201ckiller app\u201d would eventually come along in the future to save them. You\r\n\tmay find that hard to believe, but consider this:<\/p>\r\n

One interesting piece of information that was revealed was that in the Semantic\r\n\t\tWeb Layer Cake diagram<\/a>, the top layer (“User Interface & Applications”)\r\n\t\twasn\u2019t actually considered until around 2006. That made me wonder, if\r\n\t\tapplications weren\u2019t actually considered during the development of a\r\n\t\tlot of these technologies, do they actually solve any real practical\r\n\t\tproblems. I don’t think they do. In fact, I\u2019m yet to see any problem\r\n\t\tthat RDF really solves, which couldn\u2019t be solved using simpler technologies\r\n\t\tlike Microformats.<\/p>\r\n

I met Chris Wilson for the first time during the conference and took the opportunity\r\n\tto discuss several issues about the HTMLWG and IE. We had discussed a lot\r\n\tof the issues over email previously, but it was good to be able to sit down\r\n\tand have a reasonable discussion without getting as heated as it did previously.\r\n\tI also met up with Charles McCathieNevile and David Storey from Opera. I’ll\r\n\tbe working with these guys when I move to Norway and start work at Opera\r\n\tin a few days. (I’ll write more about that later.)<\/p>\r\n

The main conference was held on Thursday and Friday and featured a range of\r\n\tfantastic presenters. By far, the most entertaining presentation was Mark\r\n\tPesce\u2019s hilarious closing keynote, which featured video clips from Robot\r\n\tChicken! Although, his presentation was actually informative too: Meraki<\/a> is\r\n\tawesome! I want to set up or join mesh network of my own.<\/p>\r\n

I wasn\u2019t too impressed with the food that was provided this year during breaks.\r\n\tIt would have been nice if there was some basic things available, like, for\r\n\texample, sandwiches or rolls, rather than just the fancy gourmet food which\r\nI don\u2019t like too much.<\/p>\r\n

There were information booths set up by several sponsors with lots\r\n\tof information. Adobe had a Nintendo Wii set up, Microsoft was discussing\r\n\tthere new products including Silverlight, Expression Studio and Popfly. The\r\n\tCampaign Monitor<\/a> guys had a competition to win an iMac and the condition\r\n\tof entry was that you had to be one of the first 200 people to collect a\r\n\tcampaign monitor t-shirt and wear it before you could put your name in the\r\n\tdraw.<\/p>\r\n

Sadly, I missed out on picking up an official shirt, but that\r\n\tdidn\u2019t stop me improvising! They said if I arrived on Friday wearing a shirt\r\n\twith “I\r\n\tLove Campaign Monitor” written\r\non the back, I could enter. So I did! \ud83d\ude42 (I\u2019d link to a photo, but I can\u2019t find\r\none on Flickr yet.) Unfortunately, however, I still failed to win and ruined\r\n\ta perfectly good white polo shirt. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A brief discussion of my experiences at Web Directions this year.","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,18,15,23,7,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lachy.id.au\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}