This year I will be attending some conferences, here is my list of the ones I will be going to.

@media 2009

In a few months I will be attending my 6th (sixth) @media conference. This time I booked a room in the hotel which is the closest to the venue, the Premier Inn London County Hall. No more wandering around london in the rain, as I did after a few pints at the first @media ajax november 2008. No more standing in cramped underground trains as I did at my last company sponsered visit in spring 2008.

I am looking forward to seeing all of the speakers, especially the ones I haven't seen like Simon Collison and Jason Santa Maria. I'm curious on the one track arrangement, as I always had a love hate relation with the two track thing. Two of my favorite speakers would always be on the same time in a different room. I am not sure that I like the whole no-lunch thing, but I understand that the guys from vivabit had to do something to keep is affordable in these times.

Still the cost of a conference to me is not the ticket alone, I have to fly over and get a hotel for a couple of nights. So the cost of the ticket is only 40% of the whole, less so if you reckon that I won't be billing clients for three days. But the real value is off-course in the speakers and speaking to lots of fellow web developers from all over europe and to that I am really looking forward to.

Fronteers

The other conference I am going to attend is Fronteers 2009. Not that I have much of a choice as I have been drafted by PPK to help organizing the whole thing. One of the advantages is that I already know which speakers we have lined up. All I can say at this point is that you really, really have to attend this one..

Full frontal

The third one I may attend is Full frontal as the speakers line up sure looks impressive for a day which costs only 100 pounds. I am not sure about this as it comes awfully close after fronteers and I may have some work to do sometime. On the other hand this could be my replacement for my yearly javascript conference fix that @media Ajax provided...

So if you are attending any of these, have fun and I will see you there.

I am very happy to say that the answers keep coming in from the fronteers test I put online some time ago. Thank you all!

I will take some time this weekend to sift and judge through all off them and will put up a new version later this week!

If anyone has any new questions or ideas, please let me know.

PS
De commissie heeft plaats voor enkele enthousiaste leden, dus....

As I am working on the questions for the written part of the 'fronteers certification', I had (and still have) a lot of difficulty in deciding the level of questions that would be appropriate. To easy is not good, but to hard would also be bad. So how does one figure out the correct level is on questions. One thing is certain, not by himself that is.

That is why we had a test exam a couple of weeks ago, we learned a lot from that. As that how you ask a question is as important as the question itself. If you have a question that can be interpreted a little bit different, people will. Test subject were every bit like clients in that respect, I can tell you that much. Thank god that we have one teacher in our midst, he will help a lot in that respect...

So for your amusement, I will present a couple of questions to you, some that made it to the exam, some that didn't. If you want to take those as a quick test I would recommend that you would take them without google assistance, as that would be the case in the real world...

CSS 2.1

1. Welke kleur wordt de paragraaf (p) met deze CSS.

   What color does the paragraph (p) become with this CSS.

   p { color : red; }
   body p { color: green; }
   .foo p { color: black; }

   red green black

2. Welk element wordt rood, met deze HTML,

   Which element(s) becomes red with this HTML,

   p ~ div + h2[title] { color: red; }

   En deze html

   <p>paragraaf</p>
   <div>division</div>
   <h2 id="a">heading A</h2>
   <div>
   	<h2 id="b">heading B</h2>
   </div>
   <h2 id="c" title="title">header C</h2>

   heading A heading C heading B

3. Hoe breed is deze div in totaal, met deze CSS?

   How wide is this div, with this CSS?

   div { width : 100px; padding: 10px; border: 1px; }

   100px 111px 122px

XHTML 1.0 strict

1. Welke tag geeft een geordende lijst?

   Which tag creates an ordered list?

   <ul> <ol>

2. Is de onderstaande code valide XHTML 1.0 strict ?

   Is this code valid XHTML 1.0 strict?

   <img src="foo.gif" title="title / description" >

   ja nee

3. Waar staat de dt tag voor?

   Where does the dt tag stand for?

   document type definition term

HTML 4.0 strict

1. Is de body tag verplicht?

   Is the body tag required ?

   ja nee

2. Is de afsluitende /p tag verplicht?

   Is the closing /p tag required ?

   ja nee

3. Is deze html valide HTML 4.0 strict?

   Is this HTML valid HTML 4.0 strict?

   <TR width=100 >

   ja nee

All of these questions are right out of the specifications of the W3C as those are easily testable and not open to discussion.

What do you think, are these questions too easy, too hard or something else. Please let me know, I will try and put a full exam online in working order before Fronteers 2008 but as things are going now, I probably won't have the time. This because I will leave for london and @media ajax only two days after fronteers and still have some clients to keep happy...

I am very proud to announce that I got my very first speaking spot on a conference. I will be participating in the panel on the Professionalism secondary session with Chris Mills. I am looking forward to this as much as I am nervous.

I have yet to work on my slides, but will be talking about the certification work we have done with fronteers. And about what I do in daily life to get developers on the same line, concerning web standards and best practices.

Chris will (propably) be talking about the work done at opera on the Web Standards Curriculum.

As this is an q and a session, presentations will be short so their will be plenty room for questions and or suggestions. So if you have any of those, please come and help us out. After all, the work we do is for the whole community and we need your input.

Watch this site as I will put up the questions of the first test exam before the conference, so I can get some valuable feedback.

Chris Mills of opera has just published great resource for web developers. In this he talks about best practices and tries to get people to unlearn stuff like:

In the old days, people used to do things like laying out their web sites inside giant tables, using the different table cells to position their graphics, text etc (not what tables were intended for, adds superflous markup to the page). They used to use invisible images called spacer GIFs to fine tune positioning of page elements (not what images are intended for, add superfluous markup and images to the page).

So go and check it out, it sure is a great resource and will get better.

The commissie Diplomering of the dutch fronteers has been busy. We have met a number of times and came up with a plan how to determine the knowledge level of a front end developer. Before we are going to start, we have to gather as much questions as possible.

One of the things that we are going to test is the knowledge of the specs. In order to do that properly, we need your help...

In our wonderful world of web desgn, there are 3,647 ways to accomplish the game goal. Approximately.

Dan Cederholm

As we all know there a multiple solutions to each problem, what we need are questions that we can test. Something that you can look up in the specs.

So please add a question in the comment here or on the (dutch) fronteers site.
If you have any questions, you can contact me or, talk to me at the next fronteers meeting.

This post previously appeared on the fronteers website in dutch

Technorati Tags:fronteers, web

Warning, rave ahead

The past 10+ years, I have been building web applications and sites. And with me coming from a print / graphic design background, you inevitably get The Question popped to you one way or the other. The question is what drives us, kinda like in the matrix. And it is:

Is web equal to print?

The people who ask me (or us if you are fellow web worker) this question have different background. They are skilled project managers, very talented graphic designer and even user interface designers that ask The Question.

The Question can be asked in many different ways, it kinda depends whom it comes from...

From project managers you hear it like this:

1. I want this to look exactly the same in every browser.
2. It looks kinda funny on my computer (with strange settings), but don't spend any time on accessability. Just fix it!

From graphic designers you may hear something like:

1. I really want that header in Baskerville SemiBold Italic font.
2. Make sure that you align this the same no matter what.
3. Just make it look like my psd.

From user interface designers you get:

1. This is not like my visio.
2. I don't care what the browser does, do it like I said

The strange thing is that a lot of these people have been around for quite some time doing web work. And they still don't know what the answer to The Question is.>

If you really want to know, I will provide you with a gentle answer:

the answer

So take it from me, if you want a happy, productive web worker. Don't ever asume that you know the answer to The Question is anything other than I just provided for you.

We as web developers are being hired for our skill, so use it and ask us before you assume anything about your design.

No project managers, graphic designers or user interface developers were harmed writing this post

Technorati Tags:browsers, css, fronteers, html, w3c

Finally the website of fronteers is live. Go and check it out...

In this organisation I play a modest part as the chairman of the 'diplomerings commissie', so please check it out and join us...

The one thing that I miss in the site (at first glance) is microformats, so I took the liberty to take this

<p>
	Fronteers
	<br/>
	Postbus 10458
	<br/>
	1001 EL Amsterdam
</p>

And add a little microformats sauce, to get this...

<p class="vcard" id="vcard-fronteers">
  <span class="fn org">Fronteers</span>
  <span class=" class="adr work">
    <span class="post-of?ce-box">Postbus 10458</span>
    <span class="postal-code">1001 EL</span>
    <span class="locality">Amsterdam</span>
  </span>
</p>

The main advantage is that it makes the same data more useful, as you can easily export it to your address book. This with a simple link to the technorati page, where the transformation occurs, like this

Fronteers Postbus 10458
1001 EL Amsterdam

Add to adress book

In time I will write my own xslt transformation, so watch out for that.. And clean up that awfull onclick=' bad javascript fu '. I know I am guilty of mixing the unmixable, but hey I try to have a live beside work...

Onclick is no more, the functionality is now handled by referring to another url on the microformats website, this I found at Sven Fuch's website, thank you sven.

Technorati Tags:css, html, w3c, fronteers, microformats, hcard

do web sites need to look exactly the same in every browser

The answer can be found here.Spoiler below

Technorati Tags:css, html, w3c

NO

The answer is simple, Web is not print

do web sites need to look exactly the same in every browser

The answer can be found here.Spoiler below

Technorati Tags:css, html, w3c

NO

The answer is simple, Web is not print