Mashed Articles

This is a summary of day two of the “An Event Apart” conference in Chicago. 
To see day one go here.

Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave. Session

Jeremy Keith gave this session and he was the
first person at the conference to actually show any code (and he showed client side
javascript).  He raised a point that I have made in the past when I have talked
about the use of AJAX on a web site:  Your site should still work even if the
client does not use javascript.  The easiest way to accomplish this is to build
the site first as a Web 1.0 style site (with postbacks), then you should add the AJAX
functionality.  There is a real balance to this, because the presence or absence
of AJAX would normally effect your design.

Best Practices For Form Design Session

Luke Wroblewski is a principle at Yahoo! and
he showed a very visual presentation on design patterns for web forms.  Sounds
really boring, but may have been one of the most useful presentation of the conference. 
He gave some great ”rules of thumb” for laying out your web forms.  Because
the presentation was so visually oriented, it is tough to summarize this session. 
Luke will have a book out next year, or you can read some of his blog entries about
forms here.

Accessibility: Lost In Translation Session

Derek Featherstone gave us a wonderful
insight into accessibility on web sites.  I have always thought that
I had a good grasp of accessibility on web sites, but some of the issues that Derek
showed during his presentation really humbled me.  AJAX and other cleaver DOM
scripting techniques have really thrown a wrench into the accessibility of web sites
to a level that I was not even aware of.

The State of CSS In an IE7 World Session

Eric Meyer gave this presentation on
IE7.  As a guy who works for Microsoft I was “braced” for the worst, because
if you search for Internet
Explorer CSS Issues you get close to 1/4 of a million search results and
most are not flattering (Internet Explorer 6 has a very checkered past).   
Eric gave a fair and balanced view of IE7, and was complimentary of the work that
the IE Team has done to fix the problems
of the past and to comply to standards.

Eric made one point that was interesting:  He was very critical of sites that
claim to know how what the percentages of people are using which browser
(like 25% of all people are using Internet Explorer 7).  His point was that
these sites aggregate data and the only thing they are telling you is what the aggregation
is.  He said you should focus on what browsers you are seeing visiting your web
site by looking at your logs (he used a funny example of http://netscape4plugins.com
probably does not probably see a lot of traffic from IE).  He has a great point
for existing web sites, but for new web sites I still think there is value in looking
at aggregations.

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