Slightly ajar

Many useful contacts from @Media

@Media '06 has just been and gone. The event was like a who's who of the web design and development field. I was fortunate enough to attend this year and seen many interesting and informative talks by the likes of Eric Meyer, Nate Koechley (Yahoo!), Cameron Moll, Dave Shea (CSS Zen Garden), Tantek Çelik (Technorati, Microformats and former developer of IE Mac), Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Stuart Langridge, Jeremy Keith (Clear: Left) and Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits) amongst others. The social events and between talks were great for meeting new people, and importantly for Open the Web, finding contacts to report web site issues. I'm hopeful that I've found some people that can help me fix some long standing web site issues that effect Opera.

One of the nice parts of the trip was meeting people face to face that have and continue to help Open the Web. Nate Koechley of Yahoo! is one such Open the Web hero that has done more than many to promote open standards and get web sites working in as many browsers as possible. You may know him for his article on graded browser support as well as his work on the Yahoo! User Interface Library. If there was a Open the Web Allstars Hall of Fame, he'd be one of my first recommendations to be inducted. Stuart Langridge was another guy I bumped into that has helped us in the past with an addEventListener issue that keeps popping up on many sites. There was also time to meet new people such as Cindy Li, self titled Styleguide Princess of AOL and designRabbit.

One of the most interesting talks of the conference was Cameron Moll's presentation on Mobile Web Design. It turns out that he is a big Opera Mini fan and Eivind, Fred and I had an interesting chat with him afterwards on how we see the mobile web moving forward.

As well as the talk there was time to walk around London and see the many sites it has to offer. some of the architecture such as the Big Ben clock tower, the Tower of London and St Paul's were simply breathtaking and very inspiring. it's a shame we don't build stuff like that anymore. We wrapped up with some food at Wagamama. It is a chain of noodle restaurants that is not only great food and fairly cheap, but has great branding, design and has a seating arrangement that is designed to get people to mix and chat to the other people sitting next to you. Did I also mention it was tasty food?

Next stop on the Open the Web train is Köln, Germany tomorrow…