Web Site Expert巻頭レポート(英語)
Lessons from An Event Apart
When An Event Apart, a conference for web designers and developers, sold out in Chicago last October, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman were gratified, but not necessarily surprised. The two web authorities have watched the event they launched grow from a quiet meeting in Philadelphia in 2005 to a four-city road show four years later. The conference grew out of A List Apart, a mailing list started by Zeldman 10 years ago that quickly turned into a web magazine written for serious professionals. Zeldman’
“We got 16,000 subscribers within three months,” Zeldman recalls. “Someone would post about Netscape 4, for example. Other people would write posts in response. We collected those posts and at the end of each day we sent out one newsletter that was written by our users, but which we had ‘curated’
Fast-forward to 2003, when Zeldman and Meyer were meeting over breakfast at a Mexican diner while attending the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The two men kept saying they should do a conference of their own―how hard could it be? (Says Meyers: “If I’
“Come hear your bookshelf”
The largest group attending An Event Apart are in-house designers and developers working as part of a team. There are also people who work for consulting firms, and, in fewer numbers, freelancers. Participants come primarily from North America, but increasingly from beyond, including Japan.
As for the presenters, Meyer and Zeldman insisted they not just be good in front of a microphone―they had to contribute meaningfully to web development and design. “If someone was going to talk about accessibility, that meant that they were on the W3C’
Meyer was particular impressed with Derek Featherstone’
In Chicago, Curt Cloninger, author of Fresh Styles for Web Designers, spoke about William Morris, a 19th century designer whose work included textiles, architecture, and interior design. The idea of web designers claiming Morris and other pre-web designers as their own is becoming a recurring theme at An Event Apart. A cabinet maker needs to know how and when to use a jigsaw, router, or Dremel tool. “The equivalent is knowing when to use a heading or when you need a div tag,” Meyer says. “Given a certain layout, do you use positioning or floats, or try to put it all inline? When do you do image replacement as opposed to having the image in the foreground? Knowing all that, understanding how the tools and techniques work together, you can come up with answers in each new situation.
“You will also be aware that, occasionally, you’
Meyer likens An Event Apart to a master class, except that the conversation between the speaker and audience runs both ways. “We have thought leaders, people who have written important books, up on stage talking about what they see coming, what they’
Another component of An Event Apart is not so much about content as atmosphere. “Eric and I love people who make web sites and we want them to be treated with respect,” Zeldman says, which means good food, good swag, and well cared for speakers. The conference also assumes a blurred line between web design and development. You can’
Serious web development
The success of An Event Apart speaks to an emerging professional class of developers and designers. The field still has no certification requirements, and neither Meyer nor Zeldman think that hammering a framed “Master of Web Development” certificate to your wall would necessarily be a good idea. But the web―at least at the professional level―is no longer designed on gut feeling. An amateur’
Even so, Zeldman doesn’
Says Meyer: “The longer you’
New ways to interact with mobile content
At Event Apart and in their travels, Meyer and Zeldman are also spotting some technical trends and areas of debate. One of them is the sense that developers may go back to the earlier practice of specifying text size in pixels. The reason, says Meyer: “Desktop browsers are now moving to page zooming instead of text zooming. Opera has done it for years―if you set page zoom to 150%, everything scales, not just the text. Firefox 3 now does that by default, Internet Explorer 8 is supposed to follow suit, as is Safari, because they’
When we spoke, Eric Meyer was just leaving for Tokyo to participate in Web Directions East―so I asked him how Japanese web design and development differed from its U.
He says that Mobile Safari and Android, which are both built on the Webkit open source web browser engine, open up a new way of interacting with mobile content, “which is basically to treat your mobile devices as a tiny little monitor instead of being a whole different medium.” That approach, which contrasts with that of the Blackberry, could become the norm, with the desktop browsers more or less replicated on mobile device. What the mobile screen lacks in size, it makes up for in a clever touch screen interface, including the iPhone’
That the iPhone has managed to host YouTube and Google Earth apps without using traditional web pages is a case in point. “The YouTube application is a completely different way of getting to those videos―you get to the content directly, rather than navigating through what we think of as the YouTube interface, which is the web site’
And how will the downturn in the economy affect the profession? Zeldman thinks that demand will continue for web designers and developers. “I could be wrong, but I think people still need websites, even more so when stores are closing. How do you interact with the public if you are closing stores? I don’
Zeldman predicts that the tools for building those applications will stay about the same: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will remain the foundation for website construction. He thinks that what people are trying to accomplish on the web will also stay the same, even as new services come onto the scene. “People have always been social on the web, but now it’
Back in 2000, said Zeldman, the book The Cluetrain Manifesto declared that the Internet changes everything. “You can’
Sidebar#1: A List Apart’ s Web Design Survey
In 2007, A List Apart put online a survey asked 37 questions about the profession of Web design, development, and related occupations. Some 33,000 people, including 2.
- Nearly half of the respondents were age 25-32. About 7% were under 21, while almost none were over 60. 82% were male. Women tended to be information architects, usability specialists, web producers and writers/
editors. Interestingly, these job titles tended to have the highest salaries and the more experienced workers. - 28% worked for a company, 22% for a consulting firm, 10% for a startup or non-profit, and 23% were freelance. 42% said they worked 40-50 hours a week.
- Education was not necessarily a predictor of income: while a doctorate paid off, the correlation was small or non-existent. Moreover, some jobs seemed to benefit more from a college experience than others: more than 60% of creative directors, designers, and developers thought so, only 37% of project managers, 21% of designers.
- Just over half said they had majored in a related field of study. 9% had more than 10 years experience, a third had three years or less, and a third had been at their job just one year or less.
- Salaries typically ranged from less than $10,000 (17%) to $40,000-$60,000 (23%). Nearly 6% claimed to make more than $100,000 annually. For-profit companies paid the most, government agencies paid around the middle―and both were represented by respondents with five or more years of experience. Almost half of freelancers reported making $20,000 or less.
- 72% kept a personal site or blog.
Sidebar: JavaScript as Standards Accelerator
During a panel discussion at An Event Apart, Eric Meyer was asked how to accelerate the implementation in standards. As it turned out, he had been thinking about that question for a while, concluding that JavaScript could help. “JavaScript could help push support for CSS 3 and HTML 5 into current browsers,” he said. Meyer got the idea after proposing that XHTML 2 support the href attribute for any element. To demonstrate how it would work, he wrote a JavaScript that would run through a document, and convert any element with an href attribute into a hyperlink. “And then I thought, if I can do that, I could also support the video element within HTML 5, and I could write a JavaScript that would do something similar with video elements in a document.
“In both cases, JavaScript would essentially implement HTML 5 support for a browser ahead of any built-in support. There’
Because JavaScript has been such an area of investment in browsers, and because of improved support for the DOM [direct object model] specifications, JavaScript could serve as the boost phase for getting standards support in place without waiting for browsers to do it. This jump start could also give a heads-up on potential new applications, as well as where the specification is weak.” Meyer doesn’
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