@media, Eric Meyer's Keynote Speech

A write-up of some rough notes I made during the 2-day @media2006 conference. I hope they make sense after the event!

Eric went through a brief history of web development in relation to CSS etc. I missed the fiirst few minutes (due to transport problems) but came in at Todd Fahrner suggesting the use of the Doctype declaration for switching rendering engines to Tantek Çelik, who was at Microsoft building IE5 for the Mac. This was launched in 2000. Tantek invented the Box Model Hack (which is valid CSS, even if it doesn't look obvious!) in 2001/02, when using CSS for layout began to catch on. People sat up an took notice when wired.com went table-less CSS for layout in October 2002 (design by Douglas Bowman). Then Dave Shea waded in with the CSS Zen Garden and layed down the gauntlet to challenge perceptions of what can be done with pure CSS. Today, the real world still has source-order dependencies; some things are still hard to do, eg easy alternation of row colours which was fairly trivial with tables. Printing with CSS has been improved with CSS3.

Other links/references:

• www.cssbeauty.com
• In search of One True Layout - article at Postinioning Is Everything