Post Lunch, comes forth with the usual multiple stream conflicts as you normally get with a conference like Web Directions South. Lucky there is power charging and free wifi in the breakout areas. Looking forward to the Bert Bos discussion of the revision of HTML and CSS.

John Allsopp - Trends and predictions in web technology

John Allsopp repeated it again, the web is now the platform, he looked at the internals of the stack of the web platforms. The centre can’t hold it all, its all moving outwards, moving away from the control. Technology is removing the friction, off loading the boring stuff to the machines. Privacy and security are still important and should be considered, we must always be aware of the implications of the security and the information being held.

Day one workshops, Web Directions South, the fun begins after breakfast at Concrete, with Andy Clarke launching in the breaking the limitation for the browser and CSS. Looking at the media rich presentations with the high end, advertising. movie and music industry, questioning why they can’t use semantic CSS based layout.

Andy has suggested people need to look at using more of the existing draft CSS3 standard that are supported be the relevant browsers and use javascript to plug some of the holes, example multiple columns in Firefox.

Seems lately that we are now starting to get a good spread of CSS and JavaScript (DOM Scripting) debugging tools available. About time too, for too long we web designers have spent endless hours debugging inconsistent implementations of CSS over the various browsers. Time for us to take some of that ‘lost’ time back. Now we all know about Joe Hewitt’s famous FireBug extension. If you don’t then go get it, install it, and it will change the way you design. That wonderful extension aside, what else is out there in the market place: