It’s been a long time since I’ve written any material that has been publicly available on the web, be it personal or professional. Since then my career has taken many paths from back-end developer through to front-end engineer and accessibility expert, and now to a role as senior developer at a full service digital agency based in London that sits somewhere inbetween the two with a much broader set of skills that need to be dusted off just as frequently.

On Thursday and Friday of this week I had one such opportunity to dust off with my colleagues Will Howat and Helen O’Doherty by attending @media 2006 with speakers such as Eric Meyer (CSS overlord), Molly E. Holzschlag (mother nature of the Web), Jeremy Keith (good turtle), Tantek Çelik and many others.

Last year @media was much more about preaching the benefits of accessibility and good usage of CSS and JavaScript. This included presentations from good old Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeremy Keith talking about the “good turtle” approach of keeping JavaScript in the behaviour layer and nicely seperated from structural and presentational code. I took a lot from the conference with me and incorperated the ideas into projects I was working on for clients.

This year was completely different for me. Eric Meyer opened with a session on the past decade of the Web, mostly centred around the developing state of CSS and how far we have come now that it is, for the most part, being widely adopted and pushed to it’s boundaries. He spoke about how CSS would not be where it is today if it hadn’t been for the developers and designers that took the step of sharing their findings and thoughts, experimenting and pushing boundaries together.

Molly E. Holzschlag talked of internationalization being the sleeping giant, and gave an inspiring talk on how we need to start opening our eyes to other peoples cultures and how we should be catering to these cultures to make the Web what it was meant to be, a global experience for everybody.

Jeremy Keith again presented some cutting edge ideas for expanding on our usage of scripting languages, and Nate Koechley went into more depth about how the Yahoo! team of developers has been working to push all boundaries to create rich and interactive web sites and web applications for their users.

Chris Wilson from Microsoft gave an insight into what we as developers and what users can expect from Internet Explorer 7 when it is released some time in the second half of this year. My notes to take back to the office are available to download in an unbranded word document form if you’d like them, read “Introducing Internet Explorer 7″.

I could go into more detail about all of the other speakers, but frankly I’d rather just comment on the fact that the speakers left me in awe and fuelled my inspiration and passion for the Web once again, keep it up folks… I for one appreciate seeing other people involved with the Web being quite so enthusiastic.