Yesterday Cathy and I trotted off to Geek in the Park (2006) to hang out with cool web folk. I call them cool because the focus of the crowd felt more about results - I guess I'm used to hanging out with people who learnt how to do something in Javascript because it was fun and then try to find something to do with it, these folk seemed more likely to realise they want some effect and then learn how to do it. Not everyone, but the crowd was a lot more about design than development.

The talk was about accessiblilty with real world constraints. I guess the gist of the talk wasn't especially ground-breaking (basically the idea that sometimes practicalities will restrict your choices) but it was well presented and suitably involving. I think I found the parts about user-agents most interesting because from a development perspective I tend to think very agnostically and from usage perspective I have an extremely selfish view that doesn't extend beyond my own usage patterns.

As is often the way at such events the social side is usually just as significant. We actually arrived a bit late and left slightly early so we missed out on parts of that but we did meet a couple of folks. Discussions were had about Google and Microsoft stockpiling WMDs to use against each other, with Yahoo! likely to be the U.N. peacekeepers. They do have the Swiss Army Knife of developer sections so it makes sense they'd be neutral. I possibly suggested just about the poorest taste mash-up that could be made - if Yahoo! can get past my sense of humour I think I've got a job for life with creativity like that.

So back I am with a bank holiday to wile away and a bunch of designers not long in my past. So I did something I've done surprisingly little of lately and played around with some designs. I hadn't registered just how PHP focused I've been lately, playing with CSS was fun again. Then I tested in multiple browsers and remembered it was miserable.

I've currently got the bizarre situation where IE7 and Opera do what I want. IE6 and below don't do exactly what I want but they basically do - it's just a few minor issues they have like alpha blended pngs so I'll possibly fix them when I can be bothered. Now Gecko works fine on my local copy, but put it on a server and it goes to pieces. The only difference is that I've commented out scripts locally because they're annoying locally. All this means at the moment the page looks better in IE4 than Firefox. Typical. I might not worry, I'm debating future options about things anyway so it's not like I'm actually doing anything permanent. Just need to balance the effort/reward of life and see what comes out.

Update: Well that was simple, just Gecko being it's usual crazy self.