Still, Eric, you”re too diffident when you speak. I had a hard time hearing everything, so I concentrated (maybe too much so) on your body language. Your gestures were distracting, you often spoke to the screen, and you rarely looked people in the eye. It detracts from the content of your talk.

Two things. First, I learned a new word meaning today! I always assumed “diffident” meant “indifferent” or “lacksadaisical”; it turns out it means “shy or timid”, among other things. So thanks, Michael!

Second, I don’t doubt you’re right. I would imagine the reason is twofold. In the first place, I am by nature somewhat shy, especially in large groups. Some of that is going to show through when I speak, no matter how much I’ve worked to overcome it (and I have). The second reason is that when I first started speaking, I was a good deal less confident than I am now. Since the talks seemed to go well, I probably settled into those diffident kineses as “what works”.

Neither of these is really an excuse, but hopefully serve to explain. It’s something I struggle with every time I get up in front of a crowd, and some days I’m more successful in the struggle. AEA appears to have been one of the days I was less successful. Sorry about that.

Thanks again for the day. I was indeed inspired to improve my skills and stay on the standards track.

On Monday, December 5th, I attended An Event Apart in Philadelphia (along with some of my co-workers, Joe, Dan and John). I thought it was quite useful: we had Eric Meyer talking to us about CSS and HTML (read his after event thoughts), Jeffrey Zeldm…

I only hope that you decide to make the slides and podcasts publicly available for everyone who wasn’t able to attend.

For me, the highlight of the event was hearing about how A List Apart 4.0 came together, both from a design and a CSS perspective. I was also impressed by Jeffrey’s talks on text copy and branding.

Your run-through of Alex Robinson’s One True Layout was a revelation. About 5 minutes into your explanation, the very fabric of the universe became apparent. There followed a chorus of clapping noises as one by one, designers slapped their foreheads as they realized they’d missed something bloody obvious for years. I feel like redesigning everything I have ever done.

I found the discussion about Internet Explorer 7.0 to be very reassuring. I’m confident that nothing I’ve done will be broken by the new beast, and many things will look decidedley better – thanks to a liberal helping of child selectors.

With such high standards (no pun intended), it was inevitable that something didn’t come up to scratch. For me, it was the Critique Corner segment. One site in particular (I won’t say which) seemed so woefully out of place that I felt sorry for the designer, who must have experienced something akin to a public flogging.

A few of us in the Philadelphia Standards Organization live blogged the event. We also posted some pictures there if you want to re-live the events or didn’t have a chance to go.

Still, Eric, you’re too diffident when you speak. I had a hard time hearing everything, so I concentrated (maybe too much so) on your body language. Your gestures were distracting, you often spoke to the screen, and you rarely looked people in the eye. It detracts from the content of your talk.

It was shocking because in this site and in your books, you’re very self-assured (the magic of editing?). When we spoke briefly after the conference, that self-assurance was there, leading me to think you were very nervous during your presentation. Nervous speakers typically exhibit the above traits.

You know this stuff. You’re still the sheriff in town, and people like me pay to see you speak. We may question what you say, but we’ll always be listening.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe you weren’t really nervous. :grin:

Kudos to you and Jeffrey for a smashing time.

I wish we could have talked more about what will (or could) happen “next.” Ok, so I have all of my websites marked up and validated to the latest W3C specs, and everything looks good in browsers … so, do I just wait for browsers to mess things up and then fix broken parts? When you look at what we do as merely marking up content for distribution, is there a point at which we’re done?

Anabella