Welcome back to episode two of the Q&A with CSS Zen Master and Web Directions North 2008 organizer Dave Shea.
Q: Any comments on Microsoft’s Silverlight’s style language and on the future direction of CSS and web design? Any comments on how it’s better or worse than CSS?
Dave Shea: I see Silverlight competing with Flash rather than CSS. Right now CSS and Flash are able to co-exist on the same page, and a site can be better for it. Each has its own purpose – CSS controls the page layout and global site style, Flash controls more interactive and dynamic elements, animation, and video. Just like, say, Javascript and CSS, If you’re using them well, it’s not an either/or choice. You can use both.
Silverlight can enhance CSS-based pages in much the same way. Sure, some of the projects that are built in CSS at the moment might be better suited toward a more dynamic and graphical environment like Silverlight, but if they’re not already being built in Flash, I’m not sure that a new platform is going to cause people to scrap everything they’ve done and switch.
(Also worth mentioning is Adobe’s AIR. Since it has support for HTML and CSS baked in and functions outside a browser, I almost think of it as equivalent to a web browser, rather than a plugin.)
Q: Can you highlight some best design practices used in the Web Directions site? Can you point out some Microformats usage?
Dave Shea: Obviously the whole thing is HTML/CSS to start with. That wasn’t even a question. We’re using WordPress to generate the pages and I think I’ve got most of it validating. That’s always the fun thing about dynamic systems – keeping stuff validating. WordPress usually does a good job of fixing markup errors in the pages though.
Until we publish the full conference schedule we won’t have our big Microformats showcase up and running, but you can see them popping up in other places on the site like our contact form and workshop schedule.
Q: Can you highlight some talks and speakers coming to Vancouver for Web Directions North 2008?
Dave Shea: Being a UI guy I’m particularly excited to hear from people like Indi Young and Kimberly Elam. My web standards background also means I’m really happy we managed to get Jeffrey Zeldman to come out this year.
More relevant to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 Developer Group though, we’ve got Jonathan Snook from Ottawa taking a look at the various JavaScript frameworks out there. Douglas Crockford from Yahoo is going to come talk about Ajax security issues. And we’re still finalizing the details on our Rich Internet Application (RIA) session, but that one will be a discussion about first-hand developer experience with using Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), and the issues that come up when building applications with them.
Thanks Dave Shea for your time and bringing the Web Directions North conference to Vancouver again in 2008.
November 16, 2007 at 11:21 pm
[...] Shea, surely known the (web) world over as curator of the web changing CSS Zen Garden is interviewed by the Vancouver Ajax crew on microformats, CSS3, and other new web developments. Disclaimer, Dave is one of the organizers of Web Directions North, as am I, and it gets a small [...]
November 18, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Unfortunately, WDN’s deployment of the hCalendar microformat uses the “abbr-design-pattern”, which has some significant accessibility problems:
http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/
This is an issue, first identified over a year ago, which the microformats community has not yet been willing to adequately address.