An Event Apart – NYC: Day Two
Day Two provided more of a learning experience for me – in my opinion. Eric Meyer started things off with some Hard-Core CSS tips and techniques. It was interesting to hear how he views CSS and design elements, basically every element within CSS is the same regardless of the tag (h1, div, table, p, etc.). I enjoyed learning how he thinks through a problem and the problem solving methods he uses to narrow down the culprit.
Meyer showed a intriguing way to present vertical bar graphs using a table, tr, and td tags along with a z-index. I must say it was impressive to see how he coded it in a way that I would have never discovered. He also taught us when it was appropriate to use class and IDs within the html markup and when it was not appropriate. He explained which classes/ids within the style sheet had the last “say so” and how inherited properties are nixed with a more specific class. I also learned how to use the !important attribute for debugging purposes. Basically the !important attribute stresses that definition above all others in the css definition. He did reiterate not to use it as a means of a quick fix for a problem because it is considered lazy in the CSS world.
Tantek Celik, chief technologist at Technorati introduced Microformats to our group. I must say that I had never heard of Microformats before today. It was an interesting concept which basically takes hcard and hcalendar information presented through an html page and converts it into vcard information. You may be asking, what good is this? Basically it will allow you to download user’s contact information from the web and allow you to import that information directly into your address book on your computer. Sounds pretty nifty to me!
Overall I think AnEventApart NYC was a good learning experience and an open arena for good question/answer sessions. I recommend it to anyone that specializes in HTML/CSS design. Visit the the AEA NYC photo pool to see some photos from the event.
