Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

I am back in Birmingham now. I caught an earlier flight out of Austin than I had origingally planned and was back home by dinner time.

SXSW (as well as Austin) was a great experience. I met a lot of great people that I had only previously met via e-mail and comments. Keith was cool and his panel gave me some great ideas on incorporating blog software with some of our client’s sites.

The last two panels I went to on Monday were HiFi Design with CSS and CSS: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

HiFi Design with CSS
This panel had Christopher Schmitt moderating along with Dave Shea, Dan Cedarholm, and Douglas Bowman.

Dave gave an overview of his process behind the Zen Garden and sort of an overview of how his process of designing has changed since switching from tables to CSS.

Dan spoke about the Accessible Image Tabs he developed using the image rollover technique first introduced by Pixy. He used them on the Fast Copmany and Inc.com redesigns.

Doug spoke about his Sliding Doors technique and how he has implemented them not only for menu tabs, but for sites such as adaptive path. He also talked about color swapping techniques and how they implemented that at wired.com with 8 different color schemes to reflect the color change that the magazine goes through from month to month. Check out Doug’s slides.

CSS: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
This panel featured Tantek Çelik moderating along with Eric Meyer, Douglas Bowman, Brian Alvey and Kimberly Blessing. Tantek started out with “The Good”. He announced that the W3C had approved CSS2.1 and that CSS2 was history. Also mentioned that CSS3 is coming soon as well. He also spoke for a moment about hacks, acknowledging that he had “opened the pandora’s box” withthe Box Model Hack. He pointed out some of the newer hacks that were out there now, including the Mid Pass Filter, which allows for styles to only be sent to IE5, removing the need for the box model hack. Check out Tantek’s slides.

Eric Meyer stepped up next, talking about “The Bad”. He started off with some favelets that could be used to highlight tables, font tags, missing alt tags, etc. Then, “So, Lockergnome redesigned.” He points out some of the bad parts of the recently launched bassackwards site that used tables, although it did stay away from font tags. He showed a new design that they were close to launching that stepped forward again using CSS and XHTML, although they did over use classes. He also showed off the WWW2004 site, which uses tables, font tags, and has missing ALT tags. It also broke in his Safari browser, overlapping the text field and the images. Eric cleaned it up a bit, still using a table for the top area, but CSS for everything else. Not only did it fix the overlapping, it reduced the page size by 60%.

Douglas talked about Image Replacement Techniques. He mentioned the Farhner Image Replacement, as well as a few others that have cropped up. He also mentioned an article written by Joe Clark for A List Apart that brought to light the fact that FIR does not work for some screen readers. He said that FIR has been officially depricated and that it should not be used. He also started to go into a new technique called Double Rollovers, but ran out of time and his holding out on it until he can write up an artcile. See Dougs slides.

Brian Alvey was up next, talking about CMS’s and how IE had the contentEditable feature, which Mozilla tried to support, but in a different way. He has a lot of interest in the different WYSIWYG components and was wanting to meet anyone who had tried to implement one and hear about their successes and failures.

Kim Blessing was just getting started when I had to split to catch a 1:30 flight back to Birmingham. I am sure there are several writeups around of the rest of the panel.

All in all, SXSW was a good experience and I had a blast. There was a heavy concentration on Blogging, Accessibilty, Usability and CSS, which are all things I am interested in. Hopefully I will be able to make it next year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2004 at March 16,2004 @ 4:12 pm and is filed under Linkage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.