Definitely Worth your Time

★★★★☆

The Web Standards Meetup last night was excellent. It truly was.

I don’t say this lightly. I’ve been to some of the other professional organizations around town. I was less than impressed. The gatherings I’ve been to have either been a bunch of marketers sitting around trading buzzwords, or some large computer firm showing of their newest beta software that doesn’t work properly in the demo.

This was completely different. To start with, Eric Meyer did a presentation on microformats. That alone was worth the trip. I’m not ashamed to say that when David first tried to explain microformats to me, it seemed to me to be some sort of pain-in-the-ass hack that no one was using. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can definitely see a use for these now, and the presentation gave me some great ideas for some of the sites I’m working on.

So…I learned something useful. Bonus. That’s what I was looking for.

Meeting the folks who attended, though, was the real treat. Holy binary, Batman…there’s a professional group in town that actually sits and discusses code in a way that is interesting and informative! Folks were coming from all sorts of backgrounds…designers, developers, running the gamut from .NET to COBOL. It was fantastic to finally find some people in town discussing the things that I consider important. Standards, Open Source Licensing, professional ethics…I only wish I could have stayed a little longer.

Bravo, guys. You won me over. I’ll be back for the next one. Count on it.