Q: How can you tell that you’re at tech conference?

A: The line in front of men’s toilets is longer.

@media 2006 has finished. It was great and I specially enjoyed presentations given by Nate Koechley and Andy Clarke . Those two alone made going worthwhile and if you have a chance to see any of them, don’t miss the opportunity.

The conference was much bigger this year, which is one thing I didn’t like. It was harder to find people you were looking for and even if you did find them, they were usually already occupied by somebody else. If you’re an introverted guy like me and not a natural orator, then it can be a bit difficult to make the most of the time you have. I didn’t, but I’m glad I finally met Richard , who’s an even nicer guy in real life.

A quick summary of sessions I attended:

• Eric Meyer talked about last 10 years of CSS. An interesting talk, but for me even more important, he explained to me why margin collapsing wasn’t a daft idea.
• I went to a design panel with Jon Hicks , Veerle Pieters and Cameron Moll , since I know a thing or two about Javascript, but I’m completely design illiterate, which this blog can only attest to. I can’t say how designers liked it, but it was certainly very educational for me. I knew I choose my colors as if I was colorblind, but I also discovered I need to learn more about grids.
• Dave Shea gave a nice rundown of the state of web typography and pros and cons of different methods and Andy Budd entertainingly as always presented tricks and approaches to tackling browser bugs.
• Jeffrey Veen talked about Web 2.0 and new applications and although he made quite a lot of good points, I’m not sure openness wins every time. My counter example would be instant messaging, where GTalk hasn’t changed the field much. I hope I’m wrong and this will change in the future.
• Day two started with Dan Cederholm’s interesting presentation, where I again learned a trick or two. I especially enjoyed the way to build scalable arrows using CSS.
• Dan’s talk was followed with Javascript panel. Personally, I think the idea of centralized hosting of Javascript libraries to improve caching doesn’t make much sense. If nothing else you bet that your visitors will also be able to access your caching sites which might not always be true. It certainly isn’t in this part of the world, where partial break-downs are not all that uncommon. Still, the panel probably deserves its own post.
• Cameron Moll also gave a presentation on the state of mobile web design. It wasn’t bad, but I hoped for more.
• Nate Koechley’s talk was a revelation. An incredible amount of good information and it’s been eye opening for me to learn about Yahoo’s experience. Scary that they build an internet explorer emulating layer for Yahoo Mail though (why didn’t they just drop the original code and start over?).
• I enjoyed last year’s session with Andy Clarke, so I decided to attend this years as well and I wasn’t disappointed. I’ve been a fan of Andy’s work for quite some time now and I’m definitely buying his book when it comes out. So should you.

So, this is it. I hope to be there again next year.