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I know that I'm really rather late with this, and I'm also aware that I haven't even finished Day One of the conference in my series of @media articles, but I can't just let my thoughts and experiences get completely ignored. So, in hope of getting new energy to finish my series of articles, I first give you: my @media experience!

The @media 2005 conference was opened by Jeffrey Zeldman, and he told us the greatest story never told. Until then, anyway. Jeffrey told us all about the origin of the WaSP (Web Standards Project) and in doing so, you could tell he is a real raconteur by nature. I'll never forget him saying "Here's Tim Bray, co-author of XML, kay?" as he elaborated on techniques that the WaSP used to get attention.

It was very informative and entertaining; I think a lot of people didn't really know how the whole web standards movement had come to be, or what happened long before most of us got introduced to standards-based web development.

Next up was Joe Clark, who has a real aura of wisdom and intelligence surrounding him. As you listen to him talk about Accessibility and how WCAG 1.0 is superannuated, you can't help but expect that he'll suddenly switch to Latin and start discussing platypi and phalangists and providing evidence of how they can be seen as metaphors for web standards. Nature is powerful, bla bla bla.

Joe's first presentation was very valuable as it pointed out a lot of the problems we are all facing as we deal with tackling accessibility. One of the key things was defining accessibility (how it really can't be done in the first place) and explaining a few of the why's and how's of making accessible websites. Not in too much detail, however, as Joe would focus on the details in his session the next day.

Robin Christopherson's presentation was summed up suberbely by our host Julian: "that was a real eye-opener. Err..."

But he was right! I don't think any of the attendees (a few exceptions aside) were ever confronted so compellingly with the need for truly accessible development practices. Robin, being blind, gave his entire presentation using his screenreader and you could see him having difficulty with menu's whenever his screenreader would suddenly decide not to read out the items. Everybody in the audience was thinking "hit enter now, you're on the right one, Robin!" but we were all so overwhelmed by this practical display that none of us said a word. Incredible.

Robin made a great joke about extreme usability testing, noting how it would be "beneficial if you can find a grandmother with a dog that has difficulty using a mouse." While displaying his point excellently, I don't think we should anthropomorphize guide dogs even more than they already are by society. Those dogs deserve all the praise they can get, really.

After Robin was done it was time for my biggest inspiration: Douglas Bowman. He spoke about the Beauty of CSS, at times with such excitement that it seemed as if he would start crying in happiness any moment now. Okay, maybe that's over the top, but you could really feel his enthousiasm and blissful glee echo in every word, every motion and every slide.

When his presentation ended, I realized that he had skipped a segment of his story, so I went up to ask him about it. While discussing it, we found ourselves a nice and quiet table downstairs for lunch and spoke about the learning and loving of CSS. For both of us it had been an auto-didactic process to learn it initially, discovering more and more and getting all the more excited along the way. Starting all over from scratch because you just learned about this cool new technique was nothing new to either of us. More on that in my Lunch with Douglas Bowman post, though.

Patrick Griffiths' presentation was a calculatory error, sadly. He wanted to explain the basics of XHTML, semantics and using CSS for presentation, but almost everyone in the audience was already fully aware of this. One thing that did spike my interest, however, was his position on the ABBR and ACRONYM elements. Through definitions he uses, ACRONYM is a pronounceable abbreviation. It may be just one definition out of many, I did find it a very solid one to use.

Following Patrick was Andy Budd, who did a great presentation on how to quickly and efficiently create a basic business website for a corporation called Perinaeum, although later a different name was chosen. Andy's pace in explaining things visually and with words is a great thing to experience. Andy was energetic to the max, or at least seemed to be.

While I didn't really learn much from his presentation, technically, I did find it a joy to watch and listen to.

Ian Lloyd followed, explaining to us what the difference between good turtles and bad turtles was. Okay, so maybe that was too obscure a reference.

What Ian did was use an example, which involved a picture of a turtle, and showed us all the aspects and details of good practice versus bad practice, how to use Javascript in an unobtrusive (good practice) way, and so forth. It was educational and entertaining, and Ian did a great job calling it a day for Day One.

On day two, Douglas surprised me by showing a screenshot of my site as his first slide. How's that for a self masturbatory moment?! It was really cool, though (thanks again, Doug), and after me he showed Roger Johansson, Veerle Pieters and fellow Happy Clogger Peter-Paul Koch. He wanted the audience to get to know itself, I got 15 seconds of fame that were as big a surprise to me as to anyone else.

After that, he started on his presentation and showed us all about the Blogger redesign, which at times seemed like prestidigitation. The simplicity of the design is only matched by its technical complexity, which on the other hand is paralelled by its own ease of use and intuitivity again. And if you understood a word of that, you were probably there.

Following Doug on the second day was Jeremy Keith, who gave one hell of a clear and concise presentation on best Javascript practices. Several carefully inserted jokes kept the mood very light and pleasant, but Jeremy's points were very strong. His explanations on how we can get a better feel for Javascript (linking Javascript syntax to English and CSS syntax) were very descriptive, and he nailed the best practice approach and drove it home solidly.

Molly E. "geeze, don't you know her last name by heart yet" Holzschlag took the floor and, before starting on her actual presentation, explained a bit more about the forming of the WaSP, their position towards Microsoft (we've seen that lead to a collaboration / MS TaskForce, by now) and their activities. All this as a follow-up on Jeffrey Zeldman's keynote speech from day one.

As negative as it may seem, Molly told us that in all likeliness, none of us will see real stability between browsers and operating systems in our careers.

One thing Molly loves the web for so much is how it is globally accessible, completely international and, to an extent, semantic. There is so much meaningful content going round on the web, you can't not love it.

Molly's presentation had so many interesting points that I ended up scribbling three pages full of notes. Most of that will be discussed once I get round to my article on her presentation, though.

After Molly was done, we saw the return of Joe Clark, this time talking about Zoom Layouts and spreading the details of the why's and how's. While Joe had a great speech, I found it mostly interesting watching Douglas Bowman toy around on his Powerbook while Joe was speaking, putting together a Zoom Layout right then and there. If there was ever a testiment to how flexible and powerful semantic markup and CSS is, this would be it.

Derek Featherstone, a last-minute addition to the speakers list, gave us a thorough break-down of how to test for accessibility, the problems you'll encounter, the hurdles you need to overcome before you even get to testing, and so forth. Lots and lots of solid advice, the details of which I'll explain in my article on his session. Suffice to say, he was a great last addition to @media, informative and helpful in a very practical manner.

Andy "Malarkey" Clarke had a hilarious presentation for the end of the conference, involving a Markup Fruit Cake and a Web Standards Trifle (and fortunately no Mime-type Beefcake). "Business Malarkey" raised many good, thought-provoking points on how we could (or should) see design and accessibility. He pointed out that we shouldn't get bent out of context: most people on the web aren't blind, so please, do cater to them by creating really pretty websites!

After I almost made Andy's head explode by asking a question which he feared was going to be far more complex than it turned out to be, the sessions were officially over and we enjoyed a hot topics panel discussion for a good hour, before @media really, truly ended. Ah, but what a conference it was!

Here's looking forward to @media 2006. Where it'll be held is anyone's guess, but it probably won't be Bujumbura. Not a lot of flight connections going there, despite the sunny weather.

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