It’s back! BarCamp London 2 will be hosted by BT on February 17th – 18th. Check out the BarCamp site (above) for signup details.

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WebDD is a web design and development conference to be held at the Microsoft Campus in Reading, UK this coming 3 February (a Saturday). There is, naturally, a certain emphasis on Microsoft technologies, but not exclusively. Actually, although there are several presentations involving MS technologies, I was wrong to think that Microsoft were somehow involved in organising WebDD: they are providing sponsorship and hosting the event, but it is indeed a community-organised conference. Thanks must go to Phil Winstanley and Dave Sussman for organising this. With sessions covering Accessibility, CSS, Microformats and much more it promises to be an interesting event. Best of all, it’s “free as in beer”! Registration is opening Real Soon Now now full; my badge arrived in the post a few days ago.

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I’m just about to set off for d.Construct 2006, and I still haven’t blogged about any of the stuff I got up to at BarCamp London yet. Things are just too busy at the moment, but hopefully some nice sea air will help me chill out and post something. Now for the motorway…

If you’re working with (X)HTML and CSS you’ll be aware – or you need to be aware – that browsers render pages differently depending on whether they are in Strict or Quirks mode. (There are explanations of what these terms mean from Microsoft and Mozilla.) It can be useful to have a way of making certain which mode you’re in when tracking down inconsistencies in browser behaviour.
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The IEBlog has announced the release of the Beta Preview of IE7. Unfortunately, you need to overwrite your existing system to use it, or shell out hard cash for Virtual PC, sold by… Microsoft.

Oh, and it only works on XPSP2; bet you wish you hadn’t shelled out for Windows Server 2003 now.

Zen gardener Dave Shea’s post Bye Bye Tan Hack attracted a number of comments from people claiming that Internet Explorer’s conditional comments (CCs) were ungeneratable if you are using XSLT to produce your pages. “Strange,” I thought, “I’ve done that before.”
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I wasn’t able to make it to @media, but I did travel down to London for the JavaScript get-together in the Old Thameside Inn on Saturday afternoon. Peter K of Quirksmode had an agenda of three primary items which he anticipated eight or nine JavaScript geeks turning up to discuss; the actual figures were nearer the 30 mark, and a lot of the attendees were from the design community, so the first two parts of the meeting were instead devoted to the primary question that @media had brought up: how to get the message about the correct use of scripting out to the larger community who are already working with standards-based HTML/CSS techniques, and now want to get into the possibilities they’ve perceived through offerings like GMail and Google Maps.
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The Web Standards Group presented ten questions to Tommy Olsson, one of which addresses the thorny issue of the abbr and acronym elements in HTML.
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