Today I attended A Day Apart in Boston! My only regret is that I was unable to attend for Monday and Tuesday due to not realizing how early in the year the conference was this time around.
The last time I attended An Event Apart, it was 2008 and the conference was in June. So I’m just glad I was able to get a ticket, even if it was only for A Day Apart!
A Day Apart is the HTML5/CSS3 workshop that is tacked on to the end of the standard An Event Apart conference. In the first half of the day, Jeremy Keith, author of HTML5 for Web Designers spoke to us about HTML5. We started with an overview of the history of HTML and then went over the syntax and what has changed (or hasn’t changed) since HTML 4, as well as a kind of quiz on the new elements. It was a lot of fun and gave me high hopes for the rest of the day.
I was at first a little unsure of what the CSS3 portion of the day would be like. After all, I’ve already been using some aspects of CSS3 quite regularly, and others I’ve known about for some time even if I haven’t used them in a real website so far. However this portion of the day was really surprising to me! It was Ethan Marcotte’s turn to talk, and he went over a variety of CSS3… some of it I knew already and it was nice to get an overview, but some I hadn’t ever used or really noticed being used before. I learned a lot and also got even more excited than I already was for the new emerging technologies. I was a little disappointed that his talk ran a bit long and had to be cut short in order for the conference to end in a timely fashion, because I was particularly interested in hearing what he had to say on responsive web design. However, he does have a book coming out next month called Responsive Web Design, so perhaps I’ll get some of my answers there!
By the end of the day I was pretty sure I was going to go home and spend all night changing all of my personal sites over to full HTML5 and CSS3 support. That is… unrealistic, to say the least. However, it’s great when a conference/workshop can give you so much excitement and hope for your industry! I am looking forward to converting this site and perhaps my other, geeky non-web dev blog into HTML5 and also to include more CSS3, but somehow I don’t think that will all be done in the next two hours… :)