This morning I arrived at the conference, registered, picked up my totebag full of swag, and instantly ran into some folks I met at the conference last year. It was great to see some familiar faces and I’m looking forward to catching up. The swag bag this year actually contained a couple of really cool items, namely Dan Cederholm’s book: Web Standards Solutions. Adobe also included a cute, mini set of colored pencils that I first thought was a lame-ass pocket calculator. It would be pretty cool to see some colored doodles from the more artistically inclined people at the conference posted on Flickr. Hell, I’ll even offer to scan some in myself.
Jeffery Zeldman’s opening keynote this morning was most excellent. He basically told stories about the bumps along the road to getting web standards in browsers and ended up talking about where we are today. It was very interesting to hear what he was thinking about and doing relative to what I was thinking about and doing at the same time. For instance, in 2001 I was furiously fighting to add Netscape 4 support to a Learning Management System that had only supported IE 5. Meanwhile, he was firing up The WaSP to help with a lot of those problems.