I had a strange day.
I attended the University of Iowa Web Camp in Iowa City today. I went because Eric Meyer was giving the keynote: an updated version of The Standards Payoff (in brief: why you should design sites with Web Standards). I mean, Eric Meyer is THE CSS GURU. CSS is something I’ve devoted a large part of my last year learning about/thinking about/researching/etc. It’s a bit like going to see one of your favorite bands in concert (in an odd sort of way).
Lunch time came around and I got the wild hair to see if I could tag along to wherever he was going and join him and pick his brain for awhile. He very graciously (actually sorta awkwardly, as I would have done had some really random stranger come up and invited me to lunch) accepted and we went to Pancheros. One of the other keynotes (Daniel Frommelt, Webmaster at U of Wisconsin, Plattville, and that guy who retooled slashdot with Web standards on A List Apart. Came along as well (as he and Eric had already arranged to eat lunch together, I really hope I wasn’t intruding, they told me I wasn’t ;)). Daniel is a great speaker actually, and quite knowledgable about the whole accessibility thing. So as you can imagine, it wasn’t hard to find stuff to talk about. A CSS guru, and an accessibility guru…
Good times, good conversations about lots of little random things. One interesting point of conversation was the advent of the “Web guru popstar”. For example, the fact that I was really excited to be meeting, and eating lunch with Eric Meyer, and how several younger Web developers had him autograph their copy of Cascading style sheets, the definitive guide (among others). And how I thought to bring my copy of that book to have him autograph, but then left it behind, thinking I wouldn’t probably get so much as the chance to talk to him. Silly me…
Thanks Eric, for humoring me, and for letting a young startstruck Web Developer intrude on your time a bit :)
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