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Yesterday was DEWD day: the july 24th, 2005 meeting for the Dutch Enthousiastic Web Developers. Among other things, we discussed Opera's lousy interface, Javascript and the deprecation of the term "DHTML" and making these social gatherings a monthly event with a theme for each of them.

The meeting was dominated by a fun atmosphere with lots of jokes and silliness. As you can see in the picture, Hayo had a bit of difficulty with his camera after the first few beers, but a tip from Egor helped him out. Update: okay, so it was Sjors who said that originally, my bad.

We didn't really have an agenda for the meeting, as we generally never do, but I wanted to discuss a few specific topics nonetheless. One of them was my idea for a conference in the Netherlands, much like @media but then slightly different.

Everyone agreed that organizing a conference that aimed itself towards the Dutch audience in particular would be a great step towards finally spreading Web Standards awareness here. One of the things that @media sort of failed at was that it hoped to get an audience that was new to it all, consisting of both developers and executives (a.k.a. the people with money and decision-making powers). However, @media's crowd was nearly entirely made up of people that have long since been using CSS for layout along with semantic XHTML. It was great fun, but it didn't quite reach the audience that Patrick had meant to reach when he set out to organize @media.

For this Dutch conference, we would do a few things differently.

Parallel sessions

Hayo suggested we do parallel sessions, mainly because we would be having several targetted audiences. One audience consists of business executives that need to be convinced of the need and importance of using web standards in today's websites, another consists of web developers that are still using outdated and/or inaccessible techniques (tables, frames, and so forth) that we want to introduce to using CSS for layout (on semantic markup). A third would be the audience as seen at @media, with more challenging, sophisticated presentations for those already doing things pretty damn well.

To keep things interesting for each of the audiences, it would be imperative to separate them and run them parallel of each other. After all, business executives would have no interest in learning how to use CSS to make a 2-column layout, and developers that think CSS is only for styling hyperlinks would get horribly overwhelmed and confused when you start analyzing the accessibility aspects of the Gilder/Levin versus Leahy/Langridge image replacement techniques.

However, there is a problem. We have another audience that we wish to see present at this conference: design schools and similar educations. The people who are currently teaching students how to do graphic design for the web are also the ones teaching them how to create websites. Problem is, the schools themselves in the Netherlands are horribly behind on things. They educate what can only be considered worst practices, and we need to get those people up to date pronto. That means convincing them of the value (and benefits) of using web standards and educating them how to do so at the same time.

Obviously, it'll be a bit of an organizational nightmare to make things work as fluently as we'd like them to, but fortunately we're only still in the very first phase and have plenty of time to work it out.

On the whole, the goal of this conference will be:

• to get managers and executives willing enough to let their developers spend a lot of time getting re-educated so that they can use web standards instead of old practices;
• to get said developers intrigued and willing to re-educate themselves;
• to get schools that teach old practices willing to change, and re-educated so that they can teach new practices to begin with;
• to further inform those "already in the know" on web standards about the more tricky aspects of accessibility and usability

Should be fun!

People

So who were present anyway? Well, on my left were sitting Rob Mientjes, Egor Kloos and Sjors Rijsdam.

Rob's a young but creative designer and all-round programmer, currently hard at work at making the judges of his Pushing CSS contest finish their jobs so they can announce a winner.

Egor is well-known for his Gemination CSS Zen Garden design, which caused quite a snowball effect. The result of his design was that many people have since started using "MOSe" (coined by Dave Shea of the CSS Zen Garden), or Mozilla/Opera/Safari enhancements. The principle is simple, you just use CSS selectors that IE doesn't understand to add richness to your site for browsers that do. Egor made an entirely separate design using this technique, and as a result he is still receiving e-mails from confused fans, wondering why "the Garden is broken."

Sjors is co-director of Plerion, along with Hayo. Plerion is a Dutch web development agency that solely uses web standards. He's the more technical one of the two, focusing on PHP and databases rather than design.

On my right were Sjoerd Visscher, Alper Çuğun and Mark Wubben. Sjoerd and Alper were newcomers to the group, but they fit right in.

Sjoerd works at q42, a company you may have heard of already as both Anne and Mark are working there. Q42 is another Dutch web development company that uses web standards and best practices. Something we need more of.

Alper is a student in Media and Information Technology and is hoping to get the hell out of Delft as soon as possible. Though his site states that he's a great fan of espresso, I caught him drinking only one throughout the entire meeting yesterday. Alper is still in the process of being convinced of the importance of web standards and accessibility, though I think we're doing a good job at it. ;-)

Mark enjoys a fair bit of fame for his excellent work on sIFR, which is now pretty much his Javascript wizardry entirely. He's also refining his skills in Ruby, making himself an excellent all-round programmer. Oh, and if you ever run into him, make sure that whatever JavaScript-application you've created is free of memory leaks.

Then right next to me is the guy you see fumbling with a camera at the top of this post: Hayo Bethlehem. Contrary to what that picture may make you think, Hayo is a great photographer and designer, and is co-director of Plerion with Sjors.

Thoughts and musings

This group of people sparked plenty of thought-provoking discussions, so the meeting was not just about my conference idea. We discussed, in great detail even, the complexity of the Internet as a new medium. I went on a tangent explaining how I feel that most people in this world don't get that the Internet is incomprehensible. A lot of people are trying to understand the workings of the 'Net and act accordingly, but they all misunderstand or underestimate it. They all get it to an extent, but the Internet is too much of a living and breathing organism of its own, by now. It grows organically and exponentially, it goes in directions that nobody expected or even understands. Big companies make claims, such as "in 5 years we'll have the mobile web running all over the web of today" but 5 years ago, similar claims were made and we still see nothing of that. The web will do what the web wants, going 'round predicting major courses of the web is simply futile.

That was my tangent, anyway. We continued on the subject by discussing Google and how they, contrary to most others, seem to have a pretty good clue on what the Internet can and will do.

Alper was unfamiliar with Google's 20% rule, which - for those of you that aren't aware of it, either - means that all Google employees are allowed to use 20% of their work hours on their own projects. Creative innovations have been the result of this rule in many, many cases.

Eventually we all headed out to Karalis Pizzeria for dinner, where just before the restaurant I encountered the image on the right. It's a wheelchair-ramp placed in front of a building that houses about ten public offices and companies of sorts. The ramp was placed only a few days ago, as it wasn't there when I went to Karalis last monday.

It's good to see some accessibility coming to life in the Netherlands. It's sad to realize that this is still one of the very first happenings of such throughout the country.

Moving on, at Karalis we discussed the official deprecation of the term "DHTML" (or re-using it for Deprecated HTML) as well as gathering anecdotes on bad practices we've heard over the years. "We want to save bandwidth on the menu and footer markup, so let's use frames!" or "the menu has to be visible all the time, so let's use frames!" Oh, is it clear yet that Frames Are The Suck™? We think so, anyway.

One last topic was my idea of turning these meetings into monthly events, as I'd announced on my blog before. People were generally in favor of this, with the following mentions:

• they should be monthly, but held on saturday and sunday alternatingly, as some people can't participate if it's only held on either day each month;
• themed meetings are a good idea, putting the focus on one topic each month. The same themes should not be held repeatedly on a sunday or saturday, of course;
• indications of how sophisticated the meeting will be are going to be useful as we want to make them more public, hopefully drawing some new developers to them who can ask questions about standards-based web development practices. The meetings won't turn into workshops, but the idea is very similar;
• presentations were quickly shoved off the table, as we'd be unable to hold the meetings in cozy restaurant environments if we were to have presentations

For now, we'll be doing some work behind the scenes, but you'll hear from DEWD again very soon. Perhaps under a different name, though. No, not SWEET (Standards-compliant Web Engineers Eat Toast). A better name.

There's a DEWD meeting pool over on Flickr with images from all of us, including bigger versions of the ones I've used in this post. Check it out for some fun pictures if you'd like, there's an especially silly one of me which may raise some concerns...

Alright NEWD guys, time for you to have your meeting and save your beer bill. :-)

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