@Media 2008 London. Report. Part one

On 29-30 May, the fourth conference for web developers, Media, was held in London. I was lucky to visit it and I, as promised, publish a report on the trip. First, some general information about the conference:
Media is held for the fourth time and usually takes place in San Francisco, London and Hong Kong with an interval of a week, for a month. This year the conference was held only in London, despite the fact that it was originally announced in San Francisco. The reason for canceling the American part of the conference is not known to me.
Every year, many masters and famous developers and designers from different countries take part in the conference. In fact, every year representatives of Google, Yahoo, W3C, Clear Left, 37 Signals, and other well-known companies and web studios honor the conference with their presence.
Reports at the conference are in the form of a kind of marathon - one after another, with a few breaks for lunch and coffee, for two days, from 9.00 to 17.00. Lectures are held in parallel in two different classrooms, which, on the one hand, creates freedom of choice, and on the other, sometimes confronts participants with a dilemma of choice.
In general, this conference is largely iconic and sets the tone for the community of web developers. At least it was, and I hope it will be. And now let's move on to the report itself and to what happened this year.

The first day.

The conference was opened by Jeffrey Win from Google (until May 2008). Jeff is a good speaker and immediately created a favorable atmosphere, and continued his opening speech with the report “Designing Our Way Through Data”. The main idea of ​​the report was to provide information to site visitors, not to make them think. Everything should be clear and not in doubt.
Everything would be wonderful if later I did not find out that in his report Jeff used solid pieces from the report on Media 2006. This of course did not make the report itself worse, but left a little sediment.

The following report was led by Indy Young from Adaptive Path. The session was called “Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy” and it focused mainly on the organization of the workflow, creating an atmosphere for the production of creative solutions and similar things. The right things were said, but I didn’t like the report very much, perhaps because of the manner of speaking.
Following Indy, I was in a session with the intriguing title “Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5,” led by James Graham and Laughlan Hunt . The guys tried to prove the advantages of HTML5 over XHTML2, explaining common points on their fingers and motivating everything with backward compatibility.
In fact, the talk was about the development of existing technologies and the addition of new elements, without denying the old ones. The idea is logical, but causing questions, and in my opinion inhibiting progress. But the truth is, as always, somewhere in the middle. Hurry to get to know her.
The “living” examples in the report were not used, the development of the project has not yet reached. A very controversial advantage turned out to be an example of development, expressed in the addition of the video element, which is designed to process video materials on an equal basis with the img element that processes images. This developer’s statement puzzled me as I immediately thought about how the video element would deal with a huge amount of codecs and video formats. When I asked one of the speakers about this, after the lecture, I did not get a clear answer.
After this report was a big break for lunch. By the way, they fed the conference well and in addition to lunch, during all the reports, there were buffets where coffee, tea, juice and confectionery could be refueled. Naturally, everything was free (of course, the cost of participation in the conference, which is more than 500 pounds in two days, covers such “trifles”).

The afternoon session of the conference was opened by Drew McLillan ’s CMS report. I had certain hopes for this session, but unfortunately they broke about the harsh reality. The report turned out to be dry, uninteresting and eventually boiled down to unobtrusive advertising of his own studio. Needless to say that, towards the end of the report, I began to nod, like many others?
In parallel with this sad report, there was a session with Andy Clarke , who, from the height of his status as a famous freelance designer, told how good it is to take inspiration from favorite comics and from superheroes. In general, after dinner, it was safe to go take an hour nap, which rather upset me.
Fortunately, Dan Rubin came to the rescue, who works with sites of well-known media outlets and leads the beginning of his activities from the printing house. Dan clearly showed that within 20 minutes, using grids and working with text in CSS, the indigestible Fox News site can be turned into something more decent and similar to at least the CNN site.
Then he went further and showed the layout of his own version of Fox News, which in my opinion could already be safely carried to the agency and offered to them for sale. In general, and in general, Dan showed himself to be a professional and interesting speaker, which slightly smoothed my slightly sad feelings from the first day of the conference.

On this, in fact, the first day of the conference ended and it was time for the question and answer section. She looked like a meeting of old friends, who for some reason were put on the stage and asked to react to the hall sometimes. The second half of this miracle, I successfully talked on the phone and returned just in time for the beginning of the party.

With grief I pulled a liter of beer almost with a volley, I went out to smoke and ... immediately stumbled upon Nate Koechley , the leading Front-End Engineer of Yahoo and Peter-Paul Koch, popularly known as PPK and leading site http: //www.quirksmode .org . A conversation ensued, during which I realized that they were also dissatisfied with the first day of the conference and tried to clarify the reasons for what was happening, and at the same time asked Peter why he was not giving a report this time.
PPK found it difficult to answer this directly, but from indirect hints and fragments of phrases I understood that the conference received a certain political background, in order to preserve the audience and the inflow of investments, as the participants are not only developers who strongly support standards a sensitive issue, but also project and company managers, as well as potential investors who may not like some of the rigidity of their views and opinions.
Nate, in turn, instilled hope in me, saying that the first day was devastated by designers, content workers and others like them, and tomorrow he would "stick the Front-End flag in this scene."
And with these thoughts I crawled into the hotel, waiting for the second day of the conference.
To be continued.
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