Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Refresh06 — Crash Course Day

November 15, 2006

CSS · Design (Web) · Random

Today, I attended the first day of the Refresh06 Web con­fer­ence here in Orlando. I attended 2 crash courses. One of them was taught by Andy Budd, pic­tures on the right. I had read his CSS book last spring. I enjoyed meet­ing him and get­ting to chat with him a cou­ple of times dur­ing the day. I also had him sign my copy of his book.

I enjoyed his sem­i­nar. It was a good review of the mate­r­ial I had read in the book. I am look­ing for­ward to reread­ing his book and apply­ing more of it to my CSS skills.

The sec­ond sem­i­nar was Under­stand­ing AJAX by Jeremy Keith. I knew a lit­tle bit about AJAX and this sem­i­nar was a great intro­duc­tion to the con­cepts of AJAX. The most help­ful thing I got out of the sem­i­nar was a strat­egy to use AJAX to enhance a site but not to use it as an “all or noth­ing” approach as many sites do today.

Jeremy is apply­ing the prin­ci­ple of grace­ful degra­da­tion from CSS and apply­ing them to AJAX. I am really intrigued by this strat­egy and want to con­sider apply­ing it to an AJAX solu­tion I have con­sid­ered for God­Squad. You can view his pre­sen­ta­tion online.

I also enjoyed get­ting to know some of the other con­fer­ence atten­dees. One guy works for the Orange County Library sys­tem, one with the Cen­sus Bureau in D.C., and one of the atten­dees works for Cen­tral Wyoming Col­lege (I don’t believe he is respon­si­ble for their site cur­rent design). Most of the peo­ple I met are more on the pro­gram­ming side of Web devel­op­ment. I am look­ing for­ward to the start of the con­fer­ence tomorrow.

[tags]refresh06, refresh orlando, andy budd, jeremy keith, css mastery[/tags]