While I gath­er my thoughts on @media, a quick men­tion of the Lon­don WSG meet­ing on Wednes­day night, which was on the top­ic of Find­abil­i­ty.

There were three pre­sen­ta­tions; the first, by Cyril Doussin, intro­duced the sub­ject and explained the core con­cepts behind it; the ways in which users find your con­tent (or prod­uct) and how you can make it eas­i­er for them.

Next, Stu­art Colville showed prac­ti­cal ways to make the con­tent on your site more find­able, from design through to mark-up, style and behav­iour. He raised the inter­est­ing point that tag­ging is bet­ter than cat­e­goris­ing, as cat­e­gories tend to be fixed where­as con­tent changes over time as infor­ma­tion evolves; time for me to start using Word­Press’ tag­ging function.

Final­ly, Steve Mar­shall showed off Yahoo!‘s lat­est project, Fire Eagle (cur­rent­ly invi­ta­tion only; I was hand­ed one at @media today), which is a ser­vice that lets you update your phys­i­cal loca­tion across mul­ti­ple sites and ser­vices. It’s pret­ty impres­sive in the­o­ry, but the fact that I can only cur­rent­ly update from the desk­top means I am lim­it­ed to home or work, mostly.

The whole evening was nice­ly bal­anced to appeal to a broad range of skills and knowl­edge, and had the right mix of the­o­ry, prac­tice, and show­ing off. I’m aim­ing to get more involved in organ­is­ing future events, and I hope to be part of more qual­i­ty events like this one.

I intend­ed to write about the WSG meet­ing and the first day of @media, but drink­ing social­is­ing net­work­ing has occu­pied my spare time. Still, I got to hear some sala­cious gos­sip about well-known char­ac­ters in the web com­mu­ni­ty, so it was worth it for that alone.

Some inter­est­ing stuff about HTML 5 to dis­cuss shortly. 

Hav­ing missed the open­ing par­ty, my intro­duc­tion to Lon­don Web Week was last night’s Micro­for­mats vEvent. Unfor­tu­nate­ly it was­n’t a good intro­duc­tion, for two reasons;

First (and fore­most), it was­n’t real­ly about Micro­for­mats. The first speak­er talked about RDFa and GRDDL, the sec­ond about RDFa and FOAF.

Sec­ond, the pre­sump­tion was that we had an extreme­ly high lev­el of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge; a pre­sump­tion that was­n’t true, in my case at least. I’m fair­ly new to Micro­for­mats but I have a pret­ty good idea of what they’re about; both talks went over my head any­way. And my poor wife, who’s learn­ing about them for the first time, had no idea what was going on.

The descrip­tion of the event said:

We hope that no mat­ter your expe­ri­ence lev­el, you’ll find the evening infor­ma­tive, enjoy­able and inspiring. 

I did­n’t. In fact, it may well have been counter-pro­duc­tive for me; it took a sub­ject I’m excit­ed about, and made it sound com­pli­cat­ed and boring.

I’m sure that some peo­ple would have got a lot out of it — the man next to me who’s study­ing for his pHD in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence cer­tain­ly seemed to enjoy it — but I think the organ­is­ers should have been more hon­est about the tech­ni­cal knowl­edge required, and saved some atten­dees a bit of time.

I did get a book for ask­ing a ques­tion, how­ev­er, so it was­n’t a total loss.

My uncan­ny pow­ers of pre­dic­tion con­tin­ue to amaze even me; in Feb­ru­ary I wrote of three things I’d like to see in Fire­fox 3.1, and yes­ter­day Mozil­la announced that there will be a point release some­time in the near future.

No news on whether my requests will be imple­ment­ed, but I have my fin­gers crossed.

GTA IV has been occu­py­ing my spare time recent­ly, with extra-cur­ric­u­lar web work tak­ing a back seat (pun intend­ed). But next week should put paid to that, as Lon­don Web Week takes place – and I’ll be attend­ing a lot of it.

So far I’ve reserved places at the open­ing par­ty, the Micro­for­mats and Find­abil­i­ty events, and the two-day @Media con­fer­ence; I may well make the clos­ing par­ty on Sun­day as well. I want­ed to attend Bar Camp but tick­ets went faster than hot cakes and I missed my chance.

Oth­er than @Media, which I enjoyed great­ly last year and no doubt will do so again, I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to the Micro­for­mats event. I’ve recent­ly start­ed imple­ment­ing hAtom and hCal­en­dar on sites I’ve been pro­duc­ing and am find­ing it huge­ly interesting.

The WSG’s Find­abil­i­ty event I’m antic­i­pat­ing less, but then I thought the same about last year’s Micro­for­mats talk and regret­ted not attend­ing, so this time I don’t want to make a sim­i­lar mistake.

I’ve no doubt this will pro­vide me with plen­ty to write about in the com­ing weeks and months, and it’s excit­ing to have so much hap­pen­ing on your doorstep. If you’re plan­ning to attend and want to say hel­lo, let me know; it’ll be nice to put a face to a name.

One of the pieces of good news from the Inter­net Explor­er 8 announce­ment is that the new brows­er will sup­port gen­er­at­ed con­tent. This is some­thing the IE team have been resist­ing for a while, but it’s a very use­ful and flex­i­ble exten­sion to CSS (whether or not it should be includ­ed is an argu­ment for a dif­fer­ent time).

At it’s most basic lev­el of usage, con­tent allows you to append strings at the begin­ning or end of an ele­ment. In this first exam­ple I’m going to use the :after and :before pseu­do-class­es to append con­tent to both ends of the h1 element:

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