This time I managed to find "Upstairs" at Fudge so I actually attended the event which was worth the effort of getting my bulk up the stairs! It was also good to have a quick chat with Rob Miles about the old days (over a quarter of a century ago) when I was a student at Hull University.

I found both the presentations very interesting. SASS and Compass by John Polling and HTML5 by James Greenwood.

I was unaware of SASS largely because I try, as much as possible, to avoid having anything to do with CSS, which every time I am forced to touch, leaves me feeling slightly tainted. I understand the tremendous advantage of separating content from format but CSS files just look so messy and seem to grow uncontrollably as each Developer working on a project adds his own bit in because they don’t understand what the last Developer did. So a tool for generating CSS from a more structured definition gets a two thumbs up from me.

HTML5 – Lots and lots of good stuff in this but I’m left feeling it’s still evolving logically and conceptually. By which I mean the standard is still a moving target AND what we want from it does not seem to be fully understood. I worry, and this could be needless worry, that yet another standard means more new browsers and more software upgrades for the real end user, making their life more complicated. Ah well that’s progress.

Overall 4.5 out of 5.