Ned thunkit

I've just come back from the Web Essentials 05 conference in Sydney.

The conference was awesome :)

It's comforting knowing that so many people out there care about standards, and the quality of their work. It's also nice to know that the gurus are people too, and that the Next Big Thing is something the community (or members of) will invent.

I really enjoyed Dougs - Zooming Out from the Trenches. Very inspirational... :).. All the sessions were good, but Dougs stood out.

The session that shocked me the most was the Steve Faulkners "The Title Attribute: What is it good for?"

He presented a server side technique using XSLT parsing the XHTML to put a title attribute after links. This used only 2 full pages of code, and has issues. The screen reader software companies really need to pull their finger out.

My notes from that session consisted of "screen readers suck".

What did I bring away from the conference? Well... I'm involved with some of the "bad" sites from John Allsop's top 83 (and it doesn't feel great ;)). I've been tryin to get the political issues blocking the quality of these sites fixed for a couple years now. I keep having pushback from "those above". I feel reinvigorated to argue for a better web.

One last thing... its amazing just how much beer computer geeks can drink (and I think Melbourne needs to invent the schooner). On the start of the second day, I woke up at 5am, still blind drunk. I managed to pull myself together in time for Tanteks 7:30 breakfast... albiet smelling of cigarettes and beer.