Highland Fling 07
Thursday (5th April) was the first (hopefully annual) Highland Fling. It is really good to see an event in the top half of the country - even if it did mean a 5am start to get up there in time! Fortunately I was on the train with fellow Highland Fling-ers Gareth and Mark who prevented me from falling asleep and missing my stop. A short walk to the Symposium Hall in the Royal College of Surgeons gave us a quick glimpse of Edinburgh before the conference started.
Alan had managed to gather an impressive group of speakers for the inaugrual Fling, with Jeremy Keith kicking off events with an introduction to the concepts of progressive enhancement (via chair design and the zx81). All the speakers managed to pitch their slots at the right level, with not too much in the way of coding tutorials but lots of useful debate and theoreticals. Andy Budd in particular gave a great presentation on CSS3 and why it is taking so long for the next recommendation (CSS2.1) to get out of the draft phase.
Mark Norman Francis covered how Yahoo uses graded browser support, despite suffering from a cold; Christian Heilmann and James Edwards covered Javascript and Ajax from 2 slightly opposing viewpoints - both compelling arguments; Drew McLellan ran through microformats and the potential use as an API; and Andy Clarke finished off with a talk about the future including a reveal of the new Stuff and Nonsense design.
Whislt lunch wasn’t provided, the location of the conference meant there were plenty of places to grab some good food - I can now recommend Black Medicine Coffee Co. which had great smoothies and free wifi. Coffee and biscuits were put on in both breaks and Alan even managed to provide some excellent swag! As usual all the speakers excelled and both they and Alan should be congratulated on a great day out which was fantastic value for money. More photos on Flickr
Here’s to next year!
Posted: Sat 7 Apr 2007 ~ filed under Talks ;
Comments
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Chris Heilmann said:
+1 on Black Medicine Coffee Company, if it had fit in my suitcase, I’d have taken it back to London with me.
01:14 PM on 10 Apr 2007
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