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@media impressions - part 1

Well, I'm back from @media, and it was as wonderful as last year. I met lots of interesting people, talked about lots of geeky stuff, drank the amount of beer required by British law, and went on stage at a web conference for the first time—but I hope not for the last.

Contrary to last year I made only one single note (mentioned below). Therefore the report that follows mainly comes from my memory; and I'll probably forget to mention a few things. If you want a more complete overview, see Muffin Research Labs Archive for June 2006, where you'll find transcripts of many sessions.

There are plenty of photos up at Flickr, but I agree with Eric that people shouldn't tag their touristy photos with "atmedia". There was this bell tower close to the conference centre that's quite charming in a 19th century Gothic sort of way, and I can imagine people wanting to share this remarkable discovery online, but a photo of it doesn't count as an @media impression. Please remove the "atmedia" tag.

JavaScript libraries

My personal highlight was of course the "JavaScript Libraries: Friend or Foe?" panel I did with Cameron Adams, Stuart Langridge, Dan Webb, and Simon Willison.

It was the first time I was on stage during a Web conference, and the first time I had to do a major talk in English. Although I was quite nervous at first, doing a panel at a conference turns out to be a piece of cake. You just meet up with those chaps to discuss the geeky stuff you wanted to discuss anyway, and the audience will love it.

I was too busy talking and listening to keep close track of the exact flow of the conversation, but fortunately Paul Hammond has published a transcript of the session. (BTW: Paul also made one of those rare photos of me where I don't look like a complete dork but only a little dorkish; see also this photo by Ian Lloyd where Cameron stole my hair.)

During the panel I mainly continued on the line of thought I first discussed in my July 2003 Keep JavaScript simple column (although without the harshness). There really have been some advances in JavaScript libraries, but I basically haven't paid attention to anything that happened between the end of January and @media; I was too busy writing the book. Besides, any panel needs a bit of polarisation to keep it interesting, and my role was kind of clear from the outset: attack libraries as mercilessly as possible within the boundaries of good sense and taste.

Of course, the next day Dean Edwards proved me all wrong. I asked his advice on a problem I've been thinking about for a while now (and this was the occasion for the single note I took during the conference). Suppose I have this nice object literal that defines a few functions to create a slider:

var Slider = {
	init: function () {
		// initialize slider
	},
	slide: function () {
		// slide slider
	},
	// etc
};

My question to Dean was: how do I tell a DOM node "you're a slider now", ie. how do I make sure all the methods in the object become methods of a DOM node? His reply was that I should take his Base library and use the extend() method. That's pretty cool, and it shows JavaScript libraries can help you even if you don't believe in them.

I'd like to repeat one point I made during the panel: There are plenty of libraries that make JavaScript behave like Java, Python, Ruby, or whatever other language. On the other hand, there are few libraries that treat JavaScript as JavaScript. Sometimes I have the feeling that "hard" programmers still look down on JavaScript, are unwilling to learn it, and therefore use a library that makes it behave like their favourite language. In the long run that's not the way to go.

I have more things to say about @media, but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

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