Earlier in the month I popped along to Web Day Out – a refreshingly grounded one-day conference all about the state of dev and design in web browsers.
Organised by Clearleft (check out photos by Marc Thiele), the majority of the line-up was a who’s who of ‘they wrote the book’ – or, more pertinently, helped design the actual specs and standards – including Jeremy Keith (HTML5), Rachel Andrew (CSS and Baseline), Richard Rutter (Web Typography), as well as next-generation stalwarts Jake Archibald and Harry Roberts.
It’s hard to overstate the individual expertise and inspiration conveyed by all of the day’s talks, equally demonstrated by some of the newer faces. Jemima Abu set the tone for the day with her humorous and impassioned demonstration of the power of CSS today (revisit your old JavaScript – CSS can probably do that now), while Manuel Matuzović explored fascinating new workflows for experimentation. We also heard Lola Odelola’s attempts to create a new standardisation, and a genuinely sea-worthy use case of PWAs from Aleth Gueguen.
It’s unfair to pick stand-outs in a genuinely consistent line-up, but special mention must go to Harry’s overarching rallying call to embrace ownership of your work, and simplify your output for the benefit your users. Genuinely inspirational, it epitomised the ethos of the conference, and might well be looked back on as a pivotal moment in the narrative of web design – which is both quite meta, and rather befitting of the day itself.