Today is the start of Barcamp Sheffield Hurray for those (Plus.net Dean Sadler and Kelly Dorset ) bringing it up north

On my way… drive ahead

update: pretty cool so far
see pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampsheffield

update:

May 27, 2007

Barcamp Sheffield

★★★★☆ Went to the first day of Barcamp Sheffield.

Was very pleased to know that someone had bothered to organise it, and organise it well (well done plus net guys) even if Dean Sadler made out he did not know what to do.

Day 1 was presentations
Some interesting stuff, Ruby shone through as it always appears to with presentatiosn from George Palmer and Adam Bardsley.

Sue Jamison-Powell did a talk on her upcoming research into online psychology which sounds interesting although I was half listing to Dominic Hodgson who did a quick and dirty SEO for wordpress (I learn’t one thing at least - to see if it boosts my traffic)

All in all a good time and it also opened my eyes to bigger corporations and the way they work.

Barcamp Sheffield

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp sheffield, barcampsheffield

I have been following the debate to rejuvenate semantic markup by using the acronymn POSH
Jeremy Keith has commented on POSH and it looks like Molly has been persuaded by POSH. I try to ensure I do it but being honest it doesn’t always happen I am getting better So I advocate this 100%. Getting an acronym to help persuade people can only be good.

I must say in this last year I have refined loads semantically (but there is still work) , microformats and other nuggets have changed the way I code and accessibility and sites have definately improved

However when you read around there are a lot of instances where people are defining your coding(Markup/CSS whatever) through class name insistence, tagging preferences etc to the finite detail and I wonder if this could have a negative effect!

Are some people going to be turned of by the fact there are these standards?

With all the technologies we have to learn as professionals (HTML,CSS,JAVASCRIPT,PHP_ASP_CF or whatever,XML,XLST etc ) are some of us just going to forget?
Remembering everything is not practical and the lack of support within editors is weak.

So maybe it should be incorporated in the standard markup language (Stand up HTML 5) but as discussed within the working group this can mean problems with backwards compatibility, incorrect interpretation etc
However I worry because they(I am also a member so I should say we) are also spending time debating about whether to
re-introduce the font tag

I believe we need a semantically correct human and machine readable web and maybe this is a point to start

What about a series of standard prefixes as proposed by others but on a more basic level ?