Hanging Out With The Elite

You know how I said I was more comfortable this year than last at the Plenary It’s true, but it’s also still enlightening to be reminded, again and again, how much I don’t know. Today, we spent two hours talking about text direction, and the issues it presents to CSS and other web standards. I was completely lost. Here’s just a taste of the vocabulary:

  • grapheme clusters
  • Boustrophedon
  • glyphs
  • diacritics\
    That’s just the beginning. It was a enlightening as it was confusing. It makes me long for selectors, adjacent siblings, shrinkwrap, specificity and the box model.\
    The other funny thing is that as brilliant as all the people here are, they’re an extremely diverse group. It’s fun to see so many different types of people interacting so well (usually). Everyone has been very friendly, even thought a lot of us are competitors, we all seem to get along. There is, of course, a lot of friendly needling, but overall, it’s been a very collegial experience. I love nerds.

By Kevin Lawver

Web developer, Software Engineer @ Gusto, Co-founder @ TechSAV, husband, father, aspiring social capitalist and troublemaker.