This week on twitter Molly Holzschlag live tweeted the conversation with Bill Gates at Mix n’ Mash not that the twitter feed really had any important information in it. Anyway Molly did put the seemingly sanitised highlights of the conversation on her blog, thanks for pushing the points Molly.

The topic centred around Web Standards (recommendations for the purists) and IE8 development and the resultant loss of transparency that the development team used to have. Bet you have noticed that too, been very quite on the IE8 development news front hasn’t it (update:  yes silence does usually mean we commonly think inaction even if MS says it isn’t sitting on its hands). So like us all Molly and others are smelling the old Microsoft rat.

Last Sunday I was sitting in the belly of a 737 at 12km’s up, hurtling across the Nullarbor Plain at 748 kmph from Sydney to Perth, with part of the Perth Posse. Hundreds of people in web community from around Australasia were then returning back to their respective towns and cities to family and loved ones. The compressed web geek week of OzIA, Web Directions South and WebJam is now over for another year. This year was enjoyable, but less intense from the previous years, which was good.

Last afternoon of Web Directions South 2007, it’s all gone a little to fast, this year there was a large number of people from under the radar. This was good. The use of the business stream at the conference would have done this.

Lisa Herrod - Usability: more than skin deep

Consideration of usability is more than just the visual layer, we have the consider the code aspect from the user experience and the technical aspects.

Day Two, after drinks at the Watershed. Early start with a small breakfast with Bert Bos. This was interesting to see Bert’s view and personal passions. His perfect world of online privacy and security has been tempered by his immersion into the security community. I can see why Bert has his view, but I think he needs to look into a real world view, things are changing. Also discussed was the proposed additions to CSS like translation of the print paradigm to the web paradigm.