An Ajax Experience

It was pretty hard to pass up Ajaxian's latest conference, being both in my region and interesting to me.  I didn't investigate the gender ratio at this one, because I was cynically confident there were no female speakers.  But I was really intrigued by the conference's emphasis on user interface design, the front end of things, and so off I went, double-X chromosomes and all.

Some observations, in no particular order:

• Why are Java developers so heavily represented in the Ajax realm?  Aside from the lamentable renaming of LiveScript, I see very little connection.

• Why was Mark Meeker's presentation about building accessible Ajax so sparsely attended?  For that matter, why wasn't attendance mandatory?

• Has Firebug completely overtaken Venkman?

• Where has YSlow been all my life?

• 

  Are we not jQuery?

  3 comments
• Which bright spark thought up the Devo hat logo for jQuery?

Aside from the gender imbalance, I was bothered by the frequent misuse of "it's" on many of the presentation slides.  If I were the conference czarina, I would sentence all aspiring presenters to confinement with the AP or Chicago style manuals, or, hell, even just Strunk and White, until they can cite the rule for the appropriate use of "it's" from memory.