Philadelphia Standards Organization

Jeff, Tim, Martin, and Michael - great job liveblogging. Since my rickety iBook didn’t do so well in the competition for wi-fi earlier today, I thought I’d post a few general thoughts about the event.

Highlights

• All of Zeldman’s talks. Seriously, he is an excellent speaker. He knew what he was going to say, how to say it clearly and concisely, and what examples would illustrate his points well. Two of my favorite presentations were his talk on “Textism” (clear copywriting and labeling on the web) and “Finding brand narratives” (creating an appropriate and effective brand experience for the user). He also threw in some smart advice about working with clients: as designers, we have to balance exercising creative control with a reasonable amount of flexibility.
• Jason’s discussion of the redesign of A List Apart. I especially liked hearing how in the early stages of the process he took his cues from print design and formal typography in order to convey the value of each issue article. He’s succeeded in branding ALA as a a true online publication, not just a front-end to a database of good articles.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS tips. Eric is famous for knowing CSS inside and out (both the spec and all the bugs), but I was expecting it to be pretty hard to communicate that kind of knowledge in a conference format. He got around this by peppering his discussion of layout strategies with some new, extremely practical tricks - for example, I hadn’t heard of Alex Robinson’s One True Layout or Eric’s use of it on the A List Apart site. (Wrong again, James: see Eric’s comment below).

Happy Hour

I also enjoyed meeting and talking with the people at the happy hour after the conference. After a few PixelPints it became apparent that there was a huge diversity of backgrounds among the attendees: Simon Jessey, who hails from Tim Henman’s village in Surrey and came to the States a few years ago, codes in PHP4, PHP5, and actually knows the difference. Michael Prell designs and writes the copy for his company’s email newsletters, and they validate. And Lisa from Imageworks Studio (I think) Matrix Group is an information architect who has succeeded in bringing standards-based designs to her company’s projects over the past two years.

All in all, an awesome and educational day.

Things are winding down now and it was a very informative day. A lot of things were common knowledge if you keep up with A List Apart articles and all the various blogs. There were definitely some good tips on CSS from Eric Meyer and tips on Accessibility from Jeffrey Zeldman.

Currently, Eric Meyer is showing off some of his code from sites he reworked. It’s some geeky stuff, but we all love it.

I’m getting ready for the Pixelworthy Happy Hour and a Half coming up. I got some drink tickets and am raring to go.

Jeffrey, Jason and Eric are now taking sites that have been submitted in advance and critiquing them, offering some suggestions for how to improve them in terms of design or coding. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that really doesn’t lend itself well to blogging; in fact, judging by the level of chatter in the room, I’m not sure they’ve been terribly useful to anyone other than the people whose sites are getting the free consults. I’d have liked to see them comb through the submitted sites more closely, in order to pull out those that can be used to illustrate general concepts that would be useful for all of us.

Update: I spoke too soon - although the design critiques seem to have been chosen basically at random, Eric did choose his markover subject because of how much he could demonstrate with it. (He’s using the EPA website, so you can see for yourself how it started out.)

Seems that if you could take one thing away from An Event Apart, its to pay attention to the details. Zeldman and Jason did site critiques and over and over they banged the sites for neglecting the details.

• When Jason talked about the redesign of A List Apart, he focus in on the fact that he was very particular about how the text displayed (line height, whitespace).
• Eric Discussed his focus on detail in the mark-up in the redesign of the same.
• Zeldman drove it home again when he gave the overview of WCAG, when he pointed out that accessibility isn’t just using the alt tag. Accessibility has a lot to do with the details. Making sure that you take into account those who aren’t fully capable is a matter of paying attention to details.

This really defines the standards movement though. It’s not all about CSS and XHTML. It’s not all technology. It’s usability and best practices. There is a lot more involved. Its why the Philadelphia Standards Organization wasn’t the Philadelphia Web Standards Organization. Its more about the product rather than the tools used to build that product. Standards are about the details not about the techonologies.