Web Directions North: Day 1

February 8, 2007, 9:37 PM | 2 Comments

The first day of Web Directions North turned out to be a pretty full day. First off, every session was great and I’ve definitely learned a lot, had old ideas resurface and I’ve definitely thought about things in new ways.

The opening keynote with Molly Holzschlag was both enjoyable and interactive. I’d never heard Molly speak live before, but she’s definitely a very talented presenter. Her session entitled ‘WSI:Vancouver - Crimes Against Web Standards’ was an interactive session where she both demonstrated some of her own crimes against web standards and also got the audience to open up on some of their crimes. It was almost like a geek therapy session.

The first ‘session’ of the day was one I was really looking forward to attending. Cameron Moll and Douglas Bowman were scheduled to present a session called ‘Design and Coding at the Cutting Edge,’ but unfortunately Doug couldn’t make it to Vancouver for the conference. Doug’s always been someone whose work has inspired me, so that was a little disappointing.

Cameron ended up covering that session for an hour and it was a great talk about being a disciplined designer, how designers are usually called upon to be the ‘Jack of all trades’ and he also touched on a few areas in relation to the Mobile Web, which he’s currently writing a book about. If you’ve never had the opportunity to hear Cameron speak before, make sure you take it when it’s available as he’s a great speaker.

After Cameron was done, Tantek Çelik filled in for Doug and gave a great talk about Microformats. If you’ve never heard of Microformats before you should really check them out because they’re so simple to implement and use. It was really interesting to see all the sites using Microformats and all of the things you could do with them.

Lunch was held in the ‘Vistas’ revolving restaurant on the 19th floor of the Renaissance hotel and was very good. The best part was the view of the Vancouver harbour though, absolutely beautiful (pictures coming soon).

During the afternoon I learned even more about Microformats as John Allsopp and Dan Cederholm gave an even more in-depth demonstration of Microformats being used in the “real world.” Dan’s work with the wine review site Cork’d is using a lot of Microformats and it’s just a great example of how much you can do with them. Again, if you haven’t heard of Microformats before or haven’t had a chance to really explore them, I’d recommend taking the time to look into them.

Day 1’s closing keynote was delivered by accessibility guru Joe Clark who spent a lot of time reviewing the Toronto Transit Commission’s website and teaching about all the accessibility blunders (that’s being conservative) and how to possibly correct the issues that were there.

All in all Web Directions North got of to a great start. It has been really great to meet so many people from the web development community form Canada and the rest of the planet.

If you have any questions you have specifically for me, don’t hesitate to ask. Also, for those of you who couldn’t make it this year, all of the day’s sessions will be available as a podcast soon.

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Posted in: Web Development, Web Standards