So I have another @Media event done and dusted, and under my belt. Not that I’m wearing one – it’s too hot for trousers in London at the moment. The speakers and material are all quite familiar now. I picked up a few interesting bits and pieces, but to be honest the main thing I get out of the event is a renewed sense of being part of something.
This time I managed to see Tantek presenting on Microformats, which I’ve paid a little attention to before now, but didn’t get around to seeing his talk. The idea is to adopt conventions for applying certain classnames to markup, to add semantic meaning. Ideally HTML would be comprehensive enough to describe the nature of your content, but there are few situations where there are sufficient elements to mark things up accurately.
By following a certain convention, tools can parse your page and understand what the content is. In the same way that Jaws can find all headings in a document, and provide a list of headings to a user, tools can be built to parse a page and extract all of the contact information. In fact, he was demonstrating a very cool Firefox plugin called Operator that does exactly that. It’s going to be necessary to choose suitable markup for your content anyway, so it makes sense to adopt the appropriate Microformat to do so.
Another really interesting session was from HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, the CTO of Opera. He was demonstrating some aspects of the CSS 3 spec that have been implemented in Opera. This included conditional instructions that only apply when a page is at certain widths. This allows you to adapt the rendering to be suitable for the resolution of the device that a user is reading from.
Another very cool demonstration was multi-column layout for text. Again this could be conditional, so a single column would display as standard, but text would flow into two or three columns as the browser width was increased. The end result allows for similar layout to magazines or newspapers.
For me, this will make liquid layout a much more compelling case. At the moment, I think liquid is rarely suitable unless you can actually do something useful with the additional space. As text has an optimal width for legibility, there is usually nothing useful that can be accomplished with liquid layout. However, if text could flow into multiple columns then reading on a widescreen display could be much more comfortable with a liquid layout.
The final highlight in his session was a call for an open video format, with native browser support. This would mean that you could use a element in your HTML to reference video encoded with the open format, and a browser could decode the content without a proprietary plugin. The suggested format was Ogg Theora. Again, there was a very nice proof of concept demo in Opera.
OK, I’ve just thought of another point that was very cool. There is a charity called One Laptop per Child that is trying to develop a $100 laptop. It’s cute and green, and he showed the device during the talk. As Opera has a very small footprint, it’s a good fit for providing a browser on the unit.
Right, off to find some ice to pour on my head.
