An Event Apart - Dan Cederholm
Still on day 1 at An Event Apart Boston 2007, and a good presentation from Dan Cederholm. He started out with a good discussion on fonts and how to make the best of the limited HTML pallette. Here is one of his quotes:
During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work.
– Oliver Reichenstein
Playing with text-transform, letter-spacing, color and other font attributes Dan showed how to make a lot with a little. And speaking of little, he finished up his talk with a segment on microformats. Microformats is a way to mark up your html code to with some widely recognized tags which offer the promise of cool code re-use. For the right type of information, such as contact info, reviews and events, you can end up with what Dan calls an “accidental API” (correct quotes courtesy of Jason Santa Maria). I like the idea, although I see it as being of greater use in a CMS or other programmed HTML system. At least here you can code the logic once and have it always produced. For hand-coded stuff it seems like a lot of extra work — but maybe that’s just me. But with more content coming from these systems, the opportunity is there. At Yale we create event listings and other similar information all the time — it shouldn’t be a big deal to add microformat coding.
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