As I write this, I'm on my way to @media 2009 in London. This is my 6th visit to an @media event, including the to Ajax ones. I hope to see a lot of old friends and to make new ones.

I will try to update this post as the event goes on, so if your not there and want to know what happens: follow me on twitter to get short updates, a year ago I would have been live blogging but with this twitterthingy.....

Here are some photos, I took those instead of taking notes...

bing.com is the new search engine of microsoft. It could be great with the amount of smart people at Microsoft and the amount of money thrown at it. The search results are what you expect from any decent engine (a search for wnas puts me on top). But what got me baffled is the markup of the page, which comes in at a hefty 26,708 bytes. And that for a page which has one input field and some links... Me as a front end developer, I'm baffled by that size and kinda insulted. I have to wait longer because they used front page or what ever, no way, not in 2009 I don't.

The real fun comes when you do a certain magic trick called view source. Most of the size of the HTML is being formed by inline css and javascript. There even is a table in there, along with inline script handlers...

1999 called and it want's it's markup back, guys.

The numbers

Still I get back to the size of the page, a whopping 26,708 bytes with all the bells and whistles. If you strip the javascript alone, you're still left with just 13,462 bytes.

Thats 13,246 bytes of inline javascript for you.

So no javascript solves the size and the waiting time? Not quite, we have inline css too. So if we get rid of that, we are left with 5,524 bytes.

So the css alone is 7,722 bytes.

It seems that were getting there, no. No way, the html is very much too much and can be optimised to I think half of it's current size.

That size being 5,524 bytes for HTML alone.

If they got the correct markup and got their CSS and JavaScript from external sources, the user would only had to download that once. And would get a better experience, because faster is better.

Conclusion

I think that the front end of this page was build by a .net developer, who thinks everybody got a broad band connection. Maybe that is the case, but I know that my patience is less now than it was when I had a 14k4 modem. If I have to wait, even for a few seconds, it's not my fault and the chance that I navigate away from that page would be greater now than it was back in the 14k4 days.

So Microsoft, please clean up your act and hire a decent front end developer. Maybe you could look at this awesome presentation from Nicole Sullivan at yahoo. It shows you how much speed matters.

This is one to see.

A great interview with jeffrey zeldman about web standards. He talks about his view on them and how the adoption came around. A nice piece is around the 6th minute, where he explains why he started doing standards. Turns out he had the same reason I did, he just didn't want to build 4 versions of each page but wanted to focus on the content and the design.

So In other words, if you use web standards you get to go to the pub earlier :.

As we did in 2007, A List Apart and you teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going?

Great survey, with the results marked up in an extra ordinary manner by Eric Meyer. The data is presented in a series of tables as plain data and than styled masterfully with css.

<tr>
	<th scope="row">Definitely not</th>
	<td>
		<div>
			<p style="width: 27%;">
				<span>27.0%</span>
			</p>
		</div>
	</td>
</tr>

This very simple table looks like this, after some css.

So if you want to see who makes websites and learn a thing or two about proper markup and styling, go and see for your self.