WebVisions 2006

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at WebVisions in Portland. It was my first time at WebVisions and Oregon as well. What impressed me with the conference was the breadth of expertise that was present for such an intimate two-day conference nestled in the beautiful landscape.

As requested, you can download the slides from presentation. These aren’t the exact same slides I showed. I revised them slightly during one of my worst flights on Delta. 

For those who don’t know, I’m 6′7″. I didn’t get an exit row on a midnight flight back home and the dude in front of me reclined his seats into my knees for the next four hours. Instead of seething hatred at a fellow man, I attempted to put that energy into somewhat practical use. Thank goodness for laptops.

While I wasn’t happy about the trip back, I am happy to report that one of my predications from my talk came true. Less than a week after my presentation the announcement came out: Microsoft to Push IE 7 via Automatic Updates.

Does this mean you need to drop everything you are doing and test your web site right now? Honestly, I wouldn’t. For a couple of reasons. One is that even with the next version coming soon, we are still talking about unreleased software. The other reason? Well, if you were in my presentation, you’d know.

After my presentations, I always like it when people come up and talk to me. Not because I usually remember to brush my teeth, but because I like to help people solve web problems if I can. This recent time, however, I felt bad that I couldn’t solve one particular person’s problem on the spot. 

On the very long flight back, I gave some more thought to the problem and quickly whipped up a solution to How to Keep Content within a Second Column Vertically Center in Relation to the First Column. As proof that I’m not quick on my feet, the solution is an easy one: shackling.

What’s Shackling? It’s a term I use for absolute positioning a block level element within the context of relative positioned parent element. And let’s face it, that’s a mouthful. 

To check out the fix, see the solution. Of the two readers I have on my blog, I hope the person that asked about the problem is one of them.

For those that stayed towards the end of the talk, I put on display a little demo that wasn’t IE7 compatible, but I think is cool nonetheless. Combining pseudo-classes :hover on block level elements and :target, it’s a page that was put together so I could test some of IE7’s capabilities. When the test was created, I was excited by the over hype of IE7 that I actually thought it would handle CSS3 selector. Sadly, IE7 fails :target, but the presentation degrades gracefully so the CSS can be applied without having to worry about IE wonkiness. Try it in Firefox or Safari and then in IE for fun and profit.

Lastly, I want to give my thanks to Brad, the whole crew at Hot Pepper Studios and Nick for putting on a good conference. It’s one of the best.

3 thoughts on “WebVisions 2006

  1. Since I’m one of your readers, let’s hope the other one is the guy in question. 😉 It was great meeting you at Webvisions. (btw: I tried emailing you but it bounced back…)

  2. Loved Pro’ CSS (still studying it!); also tryin to get to grips with the “shackling” exercise, but I’m not sure the code works. One of the width attributes was spelt wrong: could that fix it?

    Nick

    P.S. Apologies: I’m not the other person reading your blog either!

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