WebDD 2007 Is Over

Hello there!

The day is finally over. After being up from 5 o’clock this morning, I arrived back home at 1 o’clock at night.

A bit of Coca Cola, a Snickers and sitting behind a PC and I’m awake again :)

Public transportation in London has the remarkable ability to take hours over very short distances, for ridiculously high prices. It took me 2 hours to get to Reading this morning.

But luckily, the day ended well. I found a radio station which broadcasts Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance, apparently the only non-British DJ to play weekly on Kiss FM.

Started the day with a session about Microformats (Glenn Jones), which are basically nothing more than HTML elements with specific classes assigned to functional data. This makes it possible for search engines and other machine code to interpret the page and easily retrieve the functional data to process. I’ll give this a try in a next project, it seems very nice.

More info: microformats.org

The second session I attended was about CSS (Patrick Lauke) and how you use it to separate content from layout. Which was pretty basic stuff in my opinion, but I still picked up some tricks. It seems very nice to use CSS to provide a printer-friendly version of a page.

Then I watched a session about Ruby on Rails (Dave Verwer), which gave an overview of possibilities combined with some demos.

Lastly there was a session about Unobtrusive JavaScript (Dave Verwer) which provides a very clean way to provide fallback functionality to clients which have JavaScript disabled. It was good to listen to this to hear another point of view, not that much about how the technology works. I’m currently using this on my personal (Dutch) blog to display special effects on images :)

Slides will be available from webdd.org.uk soon.

Afterwards we went for a drink with some people and some food in Pizza Express where I got to know some other people who are working in the financial world as well, and got some more information about gatherings in London about .NET development. This was the most important part of the day for me, since it was quite special as a foreigner to be among such a bunch of English people, without knowing anyone and making new contacts.

WebDD was a very nice event, which gave me a break from all my day to day development work and brought me back in touch with the technologies I love, around web development.