If you’re interested in joining us in 2013, you can check out the event nearest you…or maybe the event being held where you’ve always wanted to go!  If you have your eye on Atlanta, bear in mind that the Early Bird rate (which saves you $100) ends on Christmas Eve, so don’t wait too much longer.  And if you were waiting for a detailed schedule in either San Diego or Boston before deciding to register, well, your wait is over.  More schedules will be released as the shows get closer.

I don’t talk very much about An Event Apart, and I probably talk about it far less than I should.  I blame that on the show itself, partly.  Our last show of 2012, held at the opulent Palace Hotel in San Francisco, is now three weeks behind us and I’m still struck a little bit speechless by another year of fantastic attendees and speakers.  The fundamental nature of what we’ve created together really is overwhelming to me, in the best possible way.  Thank you, one and all, for making that possible.

To celebrate the year just past as well as the year to come, we’ve once again made a donation to CFY (formerly Computers For Youth) to help advance their efforts to bring digital literacy and access to impoverished elementary school students.  They’ve already seen great improvements in schools where they operate, and we’re thrilled to support their work.  If you’d like to support them as well, please do, or take a moment in all the end-of-year rush and lend some aid to the charity that speaks most clearly to you.

If you’re inclined to join us in 2013, and I really hope you are, here are the cities and dates:

• Atlanta – February 18-20
• Seattle – April 1-3
• San Diego – May 20-22
• Boston – June 24-26
• Washington, DC – August 5-7
• Chicago – August 26-28
• Austin – September 30-October 2
• San Francisco – December 9-11

Back to San Diego—hooray!  I looove to visit San Diego.

As was the case this year, all eight of 2013’s shows will feature a mix of new and familiar speakers presenting all-new talks shedding light on old problems and new ideas.  Thus not every show’s lineup is yet complete:  while we already have some speakers confirmed and announced for every event, we’re leaving the later shows in the year open so we can add fresh speakers and timely content.

Since all eight shows went on sale last month we’ve already had a bunch of people register, so you should definitely get those approval processes moving now if you want to avoid being shut out.  We had lengthy waiting lists at every 2012 show, and there were very few cancellations.  It never feels good to turn people away, but the venues’ capacities are what they are!

Being a part of An event Apart has been an amazing experience for me and for so many people, and our overriding goal is to make 2013 even better.  I hope you’ll join us!

It seems like a lot of people feel the same way, because every single one of our 2010 shows sold out in advance.  We’re understandably proud of this, and also very, very grateful for your faith and trust in what we do, and hope to continue earning both into the future.  (In honor of your support, AEA recently made a donation to Computers For Youth in support of the next generation.)

So in 2011, we’re building on what we learned in 2010.  We’re going from five to six shows, including a long-delayed return to Atlanta (site of our sophmore effort), and each sporting an optional A Day Apart featuring in-depth coverage of topics like mobile web design, HTML5/CSS3, and content strategy.  If you’re interested, check out our Events page for the show nearest, or of most interest, to you.

Again, our deepest thanks to all our attendees and supporters.  We couldn’t do what we do without you, and we’re looking forward to the challenge of clearing the bar you’ve set for us!

There are strong reasons to prefer either one.  In Washington DC, we’ll have our second-ever A Day Apart, a full day of in-depth learning with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte taking on the topics of HTML5 and CSS3, respectively.  We ran A Day Apart in Seattle earlier this year as something of an experiment, and it was such a huge hit that we immediately decided to add it to a future show.  We settled on Washington DC for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that the hotel had the space available to add a third day.  So far as we know it’s the last time we’ll do A Day Apart in 2010, so if you’re interested, it’s the place to be.

San Diego, on the other hand… well, it’s San Diego!  In November!  It’s also the last chance to see our 2010 lineup of speakers, who’ve been consistently hitting it out of the park with insightful thinking and bold challenges to the status quo.  We may never again see this particular combination of pure smarts and talent, so if you can’t make it to DC (or you’d rather just hit the beach in advance of Thanksgiving) then come on down.

From mobile design to advanced CSS to the latest in HTML5 to smart content to wonderful design, the sessions at AEA this year have been outstanding.  The audience feedback has been really incredible, almost overwhelming.  If you haven’t seen this year’s lineup, you should really consider checking it out.  We’d love to see you there!

(P.S. Want to hear more about An Event Apart’s origin story, growth, vision, and future?  Tune in to The Big Web Show this Thursday at 1pm Eastern U.S.!  I’ll be a guest along with Andy McMillan—he of the fabulous Build Conference of Belfast—talking about web conferences and more.  And if you miss the live show, don’t worry; there will be a lovingly edited version up shortly after we’re done taping.)

I know it’s something a cliché for conference organizers to say “it was the best show we ever done did!” but damn.  It really was.  That’s down to the speakers, of course.  We’ve done our best to find great speakers with interesting things to say, and I’d like to think we’ve done just that.  This went to a new level, though.

You know how a band can have one of those nights where somehow, everything seems to go just right, where every jam riff builds on the others, where the music hits an indescribable groove, where the energy feeds on and multiplies itself until everyone in the place gets charged with it?  That’s what happened in Seattle, building throughout the whole show.  You could just feel it, buzzing in the room and through everyone there.  Every time a speaker finished I’d say to myself, half in gratitude and half in awe, “That is the best talk I’ve ever seen that person give.”

That was only half the experience, of course.  The other half was the audience itself, our amazing and wonderful attendees, who are as much colleagues as anything else.  They’re whip-smart, professional, veteran members of the industry.  That’s the demographic Jeffrey and I set out to address, and they’ve come to learn from and teach and challenge us to excel at every show.  Several speakers, some of them long practiced at the art of public speaking, have told me that they get uniquely nervous before going onto the stage at An Event Apart.  I absolutely agree.  To return to the band metaphor, it’s like doing a show for your fellow musicians.  While that’s comforting in a collegial way, it’s also nerve-wracking in a way other shows aren’t.

And the conversations!  Over lunch, in the hall between talks, at the party, it was non-stop talk with smart, funny, insightful colleagues who know their stuff through and through and are as keen to learn more as they are to share what they know.

So I can’t thank our speakers and attendees enough.  You are all incredible.  It was an honor and a privilege just to be there in your combined presence.

Why?  Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November, and I never mentioned it here.  Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities.  I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job.

Okay.  So.  Time to correct that.

(deep breath)

Hey everyone, check it out: the complete tour schedule for An Event Apart 2010!  Woohoooo!

1. Seattle: April 5-7, 2010 (yes, three days; more on that anon)
2. Boston: May 24-25, 2010
3. Minneapolis: July 26-27, 2010
4. Washington, DC: September 16-17, 2010
5. San Diego: November 1-2, 2010

We’ve got a pretty killer lineup, if I do say so myself.  You can get the mostly-complete list from our opening-of-sales announcement last November.  It lists the people we had confirmed at the time; there have been a few additions since then.  Check out your city of choice to see who’s going to be there!  (But always remember that speaker lineups are subject to change: speakers are people too, and life has a way of interfering with schedules.  I myself had to withdraw from An Event Apart Boston last year due to a family emergency.)

The price to register for these two-day, one-track Events is the same as it was in 2009, and there are educational and group discounts available for those who are interested.

But wait, I just said “two-day” when the first show of the year is clearly three days.  What gives?

Seattle is the site of our first-ever A Day Apart, a full-day workshop that can be attended on its own or as part of a full three days of Event Apart ecstasy.  And the inaugural Day Apart will be nothing less than a detailed plunge into HTML 5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm.  Jeremy handles the markup; Dan gets stylish.  It’s going to be fantastic.  I’m going to be in the back of the room for the whole day, soaking up as much as I can.

If you want to attend just the workshop, it’s $399 for the whole day if you buy an early bird ticket (available through March 5th).  The price goes up $50 when early bird ends, and another $100 if you show up at the door.  But I wouldn’t recommend that last, because I don’t think there will be any tickets available at the door.  Again: if you show up unannounced on the day of the workshop and ask to buy a ticket, we will most likely have to turn you away, because I expect that there won’t be any seats available.

On the other hand, maybe you’d like to experience more than just one day of AEA goodness.  Maybe you’d like to go whole hog and attend both the two-day Event Apart and the subsequent Day Apart, soaking up all the knowledge and enthusiasm and camaraderie that typifies An Event Apart.  And who could blame you?  If you do that, then the total early bird price for all three days is $1,190, whereas buying the event and workshop passes separately would total $1,294.  That’s right: you actually get slightly more than $100 off the cost of the workshop if you attend all three days, over and above the early bird discount.  (Or you can think of it as getting $100+ off the cost of the conference.  We’re not fussy.)

As it happens, these three-day passes have proved quite popular.  So if you want to get your hands on one of those—or on any Seattle tickets, whether one, two, or three days—I wouldn’t wait too long.  Our internal analyses suggest that there will come a time, some time before the doors open on April 5th, that the ability to buy a ticket will cease to be.  It may even pine for a fjord or two.

As for the four shows that come after Seattle, well, they’re looking pretty popular too.

I know I say this every year, but I’m really excited about what we’ve got planned for the year.  Jeffrey and I constantly and (we hope) consistently strive to create an event that we ourselves want to attend, and that’s absolutely true of the shows and workshop we have planned in 2010.  I can’t wait to hear what the speakers and attendees have to share.  Hope to see you there!

One of the things I’ll be talking about is the choice of markup language for the site, which ended up being HTML 5.  In the beginning, I chose HTML 5 because I wanted to do something like this:

<li>
<a href="/2009/seattle/">
<h2><img src="/i/09/city-seattle.jpg" alt="Seattle" /></h2>
<h3>May 4—5, 2009</h3>
<p>Bell Harbor International Conference Center</p>
</a>
</li>

Yes, that’s legal in HTML 5, thanks to the work done by Bruce Lawson in response to my href-anywhere agitation.  It isn’t what I’d consider ideal, structurally, but it’s close.  It sure beats having to make the content of every element its own hyperlink, each one pointing at the exact same destination:

<li>
<h2><a href="/2009/seattle/"><img src="/i/09/city-seattle.jpg" alt="Seattle" /></a></h2>
<h3><a href="/2009/seattle/">May 4—5, 2009</a></h3>
<p><a href="/2009/seattle/">Bell Harbor International Conference Center</a></p>
</li>

I mean, that’s just dumb.  Ideally, I could drop an href on the li instead of having to wrap an a element around the content, but baby steps.  Baby steps.

So as Bruce discovered, pretty much all browsers will already let you wrap a elements around other stuff, so it got added to HTML 5.  And when I tried it, it worked, clickably speaking.  That is, all the elements I wrapped became part of one big hyperlink, which is what I wanted.

What I didn’t want, though, was the randomized layout weirdness that resulted once I started styling the descendants of the link.  Sometimes everything would lay out properly, and other times the bits and pieces were all over the place.  I could (randomly) flip back and forth between the two just by repeatedly hitting reload.  I thought maybe it was the heading elements that were causing problems, so I converted them all to classed paragraphs.  Nope, same problems.  So I converted them all to classed spans and that solved the problem.  The layout became steady and stable.

I was happy to get the layout problems sorted out, obviously.  Only, at that point, I wasn’t doing anything that required HTML 5.  Wrapping classed spans in links in the place of other, more semantic elements?  Yeah, that’s original.  It’s just as original as the coding pattern of “slowly leaching away the document’s semantics in order to make it, at long last and after much swearing, consistently render as intended”.  I’m sure one or two of you know what that’s like.

As a result, I could have gone back to XHTML 1.1 or even HTML 4.01 without incident.  In fact, I almost did, but in the end I decided to stick with HTML 5.  There were two main reasons.

1. First, AEA is all about the current state and near future of web design and development.  HTML 5 is already here and in use, and its use will grow over time.  We try to have the site embody the conference itself as much as possible, so using HTML 5 made some sense.

2. I wanted to try HTML 5 out for myself under field conditions, to get a sense of how similar or dissimilar it is to what’s gone before.  Turns out the answers are “very much so” to the former and “frustratingly so” to the latter, assuming you’re familiar with XHTML.  The major rules are pretty much all the same: mind your trailing slashes on empty elements, that kind of thing.  But you know what the funniest thing about HTML 5 is?  It’s the little differences.  Like not permitting a value attribute on an image submit.  That one came as a rather large surprise, and as a result our subscribe page is XHTML 1.0 Transitional instead of HTML 5.  (Figuring out how to work around this in HTML 5 is on my post-launch list of things to do.)

   Oh, and we’re back to being case-insensitive.  <P Class="note"> is just as valid as <p class="note">.  Having already fought the Casing Wars once, this got a fractional shrug from me, but some people will probably be all excited that they can uppercase their element names again.  I know I would’ve been, oh, six or seven years ago.

   Incidentally, I used validator.nu to check my work.  It seemed the most up to date, but there’s no guarantee it’s perfectly accurate.  Ged knows every other validator I’ve ever used has eventually been shown to be inaccurate in one or more ways.

I get the distinct impression that use of HTML 5 is going to cause equal parts of comfort (for the familiar parts) and eye-watering rage (for the apparently idiotic differences).  Thus it would seem the HTML 5 Working Group is succeeding quite nicely at capturing the current state of browser behavior.  Yay, I guess?

And then there was the part where I got really grumpy about not being able to nest a hyperlink element inside another hyperlink element… but that, like so many things referenced in this post, is a story for another day.

Between now and the Chicago event, I’ll be back in lovely Destin, Florida for this year’s edition of the CIW conference at which I spoke last year.  This time around I’ll be doing a blend of beginner and advanced CSS, plus a more reflective talk on the state of the web as I see it bothj now and in the near future.

In a like vein, I’ll be taking much the same topics and messages to the stage of Web Directions East in Tokyo, Japan.  Thanks to both personal and professional obligations, overseas travel is a rarity for me these days, and furthermore this will be only my second appearance in Asia (the first having been WWW2005), so this is a rare opportunity to catch me away from the Americas.  I think everyone should go.  C’mon, we’ve had people come all the way to the U.S. from places as far away as Bulgaria, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore (twice!) to attend AEA, so what’s your excuse?

The most recent is a short clip from one of my presentations at An Event Apart back in April, debug / reboot, where I comment at my usual pace on the suppression of quotation marks in my reset styles and why I think relying on browser-generated quotation marks is a bad idea.  You also get to see my hair before it got to be the length it is now, which is even longer.  There’s a complete transcription on that page, by the way, courtesy Mr. Z.

Then there’s the vaguely silly one, in which I attempt to debug my clothing while sitting in my living room.  The main takeaway here, I think, is that my speech patterns on stage are just about the same as those in “regular life”.  Pity my family.

So there’s me in the movies.  It’s nowhere near as epic-ly mëtäl as some other folks’ videos, but I suppose we all do what we can.

Right now, though, I want to mention a few pieces of news from the conference world.  After that, it’s back to steeling myself to upgrade WordPress while stomping out the problems I have with my current install and also, I hope, finally getting it set up to do version-controlled upgrading henceforth.

Right.  The news.

• The early bird deadline for An Event Apart Boston 2008 is next Monday, so don’t wait much longer to register if you’re a fan of discounts.  If not, that’s cool too.  Maybe you like to pay more.  We’re not here to judge.

• If you’re on the opposite coast, there’s also An Event Apart San Francisco 2008, whose detailed schedule was announced this morning.  It will be two days jam packed with greatness from Heather Champ, Kelly Goto, Jeremy Keith, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Cederholm, Tantek Çelik, Jeffrey Veen, Derek Featherstone, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria, Jeffrey Zeldman, and your humble servant.  You’ve still got some time to register with the early bird discount, but I wouldn’t put it off forever, because there’s no way to know when the last seat will be sold.

  (And if you aren’t subscribed to our mailing list, then you’re already behind the times:  subscribers got word of the detailed San Francisco schedule yesterday, ahead of everyone else.  Because they’re on the ins, as the kids are known to say.  Don’t let them have all the fun.  Sign up today!)

• At the beginning of June, I’ll be giving a keynote plus a bonus session to be named later at the Spring <br/> Conference in Athens, Ohio.  For years they’ve been trying to get me to come down there, and every year I had some insurmountable scheduling conflict.  It almost happened again this year, but they were really fantastic and actually worked the schedule to accommodate me, for which I can’t thank them enough.  Come on down and take a <br/> with us!

• Come mid-July, I’ll be in sunny Philadelphia for the Higher Education Web Symposium co-teaching a full-day workshop on “CSS Tips & Techniques” with the incomparable Stephanie Sullivan.

• And in the realm of the not-absolutely-guaranteed-and-therefore-underspecified:  come late September, it looks like I’ll be back in Destin, Florida; and I just might be making my way to Japan in early November.

Plus of course there’s An Event Apart Chicago 2008 in October, but you already knew about that.  The detailed schedule will be published in mid-July, and with that lineup of speakers, I’m already shivering with anticipation.

Okay, that’s all I have for the moment.  Hopefully that upgrade/fix/control thing will go less bumpily than I fear, and I can get another post out before all those shows have passed into memory.

• Boston, June 23–24
• San Francisco, August 18–19
• Chicago, October 13–14

Now you can pick the show that best fits your schedule, fiscal year, or both, and book your seats early.

One of the things we’ve always striven to create is top-notch events for (as the motto goes) people who make web sites—covering design as well as code, architecture in addition to scripting, the big picture along with the nitty-gritty.  Focusing on that vision served us and our attendees very well in 2007, and it continues in 2008.  Just check out the list of speakers and topics for New Orleans:

• Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, presenting “Underpants Over My Trousers”
• Aaron Gustafson, co-author of AdvancED DOM Scripting, presenting “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript”
• Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, conducting “On-the-Spot Usability Reviews”
• Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design, presenting “Good vs. Great Design”
• Brian Oberkirch, Publisher of Like It Matters, presenting “Kick it Like Pelé”
• Jason Santa Maria, designer at Happy Cog, presenting “Good Design Ain’t Easy”
• Dave Shea, co-author of Zen of CSS Design, presenting “Living, Breathing Design”
• Stephanie Sullivan, co-author of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, presenting “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
• Jeff Veen, design manager at Google, presenting “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”
• Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Web Sites, presenting “Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO”

And, as always, your hosts:

• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, presenting both “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks” and “Debug / Reboot”
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, presenting both “Understanding Web Design” and “Web Standards: The Return of the King”

You can get more details on the New Orleans event page, including descriptions of the sessions and details on how to get the special room rate at the conference hotel, the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.

While we don’t yet have speaker lists nor schedules to announce for the other three 2008 shows, we’re working to finalize them and hope to have at least some information out shortly.  I can already say that all the shows are at the same high level, though of course each event has its own unique flavor.

Those of you who attended one or more of our shows in 2007 (yes, we did have some repeats!) may be wondering if the shows will be the same, especially since we’re returning to some cities we visited last year.  The answer there is “not at all”.  Every show of 2008 is a mix of new and returning speakers, and we’ve done our best not to repeat speakers within a given city between 2007 and 2008.  The exceptions are myself and Jeffrey, of course, but we’re both doing new talks this year.  Simply put, if you loved AEA in 2007, we’re pretty confident you’ll love it even more in 2008.

• I’ll be doing a short bit on microformats at the Cleveland Web Standards Meetup.  If you’re in the area and interested, please do sign up for the group!  We’ve been growing quickly and, having shifted our meeting place to the Tri-C West campus, now have room for a lot more growth.  We’re also moving beyond simple gathering, with some great ideas for helping out local organizations and sharing knowledge and skills.  Even if you can’t make this month’s gathering, you should still join up so you’re in the loop.

• I’ll be delivering the keynote at the first annual CIW Partner Conference in Destin, Florida, at the end of September.  No official title for the talk as yet, but the general theme will be how we’ve gotten to where we are, what I see as the best ways to train the next generation of web designers and developers, and the best tools currently available to current designers/developers.  I may also participate in a panel, depending on exact scheduling.

• In mid-October, I’ll be on stage at the first Voices That Matter: Web Design conference in San Francisco (which will make my second trip to the city in the space of three weeks).  We’re looking to do sort of an open “Conversation With…” format with lots of audience questions and commentary, which is a little unusual for me.  Jeffrey and I did a conversational session with Brian Alvey at ‘Meet the Makers’ back in the day, but I haven’t really done a Merv Griffin since.  Should be fun!

• Then, in mid-December, I’ll be doing three hours of CSS at Web Design World Boston.  It will pretty much be like it was last year: a mix of deep dives into obscure (yet important) corners of CSS, assessments of current trends, fun with cutting-edge techniques, and open-format Q&A.  We’ll have three hours (with breaks) to play around, so that’ll leave plenty of time to wander into the weeds and come back mostly intact.

I’m starting to do some rework on the sidebar here on meyerweb, and a “coming soon” list is one of the things I have in mind.  Those of you who actually do drop by the site will probably notice the sidebar mutating over time, since I’m going to do my reworking live and in public.  That sounds so much more grandiose than the reality of fiddling with markup and making mistakes, doesn’t it?  It’s editing 2.0!

Chicago, Chicago.  It was my sweet home Chicago for all of a year, and admittedly that was back around the national bicentennial, but I still enjoy my visits.  I’ve just learned to accept that the traffic jams are omnipresent, and to chill accordingly.

We drove in on Friday afternoon and left Wednesday morning, tired but content. As I knew would be the case, the folks who came to AEA Chicago were filled to the brim with awesome.  We had a great time röcking out, groovin’ to the tunes, filling Fadó, wondering about Shreddies exchanges, and savoring the lunches.  I’ve gotten my pictures onto Flickr in what is, for me, close to record time, and added them to the show’s photo pool.  All with geocoding, natch.  Gotta geocode.

If you want to know what other people thought of it, Jeffrey‘s got some links—perhaps understandably, Brain Freeze’s post is one of my favorites—and Technorati will be happy to point you to what everyone’s saying.  I can tell you what I thought, though: fantastic.  I can’t wait to do it again!

For example: last week, we announced publication of the complete schedule for AEA San Francisco, which will be 4-5 October 2007, and I didn’t say a word here.  I should have; honestly, it’s amazing.  I already want to see it.

I know, I say that every time, but it’s always true.  One of the things that makes me proudest about AEA, and that makes me continue to work hard on AEA, is that it fulfills one of the core requirements Jeffrey and I set out: to create the kind of event we’d want to attend.  I’m not satisfied with an AEA show unless I can look at it—and I mean all of it, from the schedule to all the organizational details that aren’t always obvious—and say, “I would pay money out of my own pocket to see this show”.

And so far, I’ve always been satisfied.

So we end the 2007 series with another great lineup and incredible set of talks in San Francisco, and it makes me proud all over again.  I hope you can be there to see it.