Philadelphia Standards Organization

Eric is talking about the recently published One True Layout. We just spent quite a while on the first part - any-order columns. It basically involves floating your columns and using negative margins to lay them out in whichever order you want. See the article for details.

Where this technique gets really interesting is with columns whose widths are specified in different units - for example, one is 50%, another is 15em, and a third is 150px. Eric demonstrated how to handle this by scattering your units across a variety of CSS properties, including the element’s own margins, the margins of its neighbors, and the left property on relatively-positioned columns. He blogged about it as well. It won’t work if you’re juggling a dozen columns at once, maybe, but for most real applications it can be incredibly useful.

Try this sometime: build a webpage, specifying all lengths in ems. All of them.

Getting the math right might take some work. But once you have the kinks worked out at the default font size, you’ll get to perform a fun party trick: when you zoom your text size up or down, the entire page will zoom with it. Widths and heights of boxes, foreground images, borders, everything. It’s akin to Opera’s page zoom.

Of course, browsers aren’t the best at zooming things like images. So maybe this isn’t a technique that works for image-heavy sites. On the other hand, background images don’t scale, so imagine a large background image centered in a (comparatively) small container, and then that container being able to grow to reveal more of the image.

This was the first ‘free-form’ presentation of the day, with no slides, just a demo and a bunch of questions from the audience. I believe it will be like this from here on out today, and this (they say) is what will make every Event Apart unique.

In his speech, Making Accessibility Accessible, Jeffrey Zeldman ran through myths and misconceptions on accessibility. He broke the topic down into 4 separate principles.

1. Content must be perceivable to each user.
2. User interface components in the content must be operable by each user.
3. Content and controls must be understandable to each user.
4. Content must be robust enough to work with current and future technologies.

He referenced the newly designed W3C WAI site. This is a great resource for learning WAI requirements. It was a great speech and I will blog on this more later. Eric Meyer is about to come on again.

I thought I’d take a couple of minutes during lunch to talk about the venue and other details of the event.

We’re on the 5th floor of the Franklin Institute. While this is a very cool idea, in practice we are in a conference room exactly like you’d find in any hotel. That isn’t a complaint, just an imagination-versus-reality thing; we’re not surrounded by plasticined bodies or physics experiments. Some people have said that the room is too cold; I’m quite comfortable, but I’ve also been known to shovel snow without a jacket.

Free lunch, free drinks, free snacks throughout the day. Door prizes. Free parking in the Institute’s garage as well. Oh, and free drinks at tonight’s Happy Hour and a Half, so I wouldn’t expect much liveblogging from there. Everyone received a free book from New Riders, publishers of Jeffrey and Eric’s books among many others, and there’s been a bit of an underground market in people trading books they have for ones they don’t.

The WiFi was horrible first thing this morning; apparently we completely overwhelmed it. They very quickly set up a second access point and divided us among them, so that’s going much better now.

And now we’re starting up again…

Eric Meyer quoting Molly Holzschlag: “Web design is perfect for people who are Zen control freaks; you have to obsess over every detail, and then just let it go.”