Styrofoam
Indie-electronica with a dash of 80s synth. Pretty upbeat and good fun and reminiscent of Postal Service, making them an obvious support act. I also dig that they're Belgian.
Death Cab for Cutie
Difficult to be objective about a band you're sentimentally attached to, but they were a good show. To play to the big crowd, they stuck to the favourites and played them as-is from the recordings. I prefer live shows to give something a little unique and varied from their releases, but it's a minor complaint. I just won't need to see them in the flesh again.
Death Cab for Cutie at Brixton Academy, 17th July 2008
Prego
Post-rock by numbers. Accomplished, but boring
Phosphorescent
Beautiful voice and keys. Shame about the bassist and his attention seeking ways. A good find, regardless.
Pinback
Keeping it old skool with plenty of non photo-blue vibes. Pity 95% of the audience had never heard it and it's chums though.
Pinback at Scala, 15th July 2008
I recently had the job of letting the microformats community know that the BBC were having to drop hCalendar due to accessibility concerns surrounding the use of abbr and the date-time pattern.
My friend and colleague Jake Archibald published a summary of what's happened so far, what the current alternative suggestions are and the BBC's take on them. It's a useful read if you want to catch-up and see where we are.
I think the best thing to come out of this is probably that we're talking about actual alternatives again rather than just waiting for more evidence (which often feels like a get-out clause for inaction). Whether we're doing that right though... well, we'll see. I appreciate the apprehension that comes with changing something that's already had some seal of "yep.. good to go.. use it!" - no one wants to get this "wrong" again. Equally though, I really do hope we can come to a compromise and "solve" the problem this time. Extending HTML 4 was ever going to be especially pretty, but bear with us (please don't mention HTML 5 to me - it's for your own good).
On lighter notes, here's a couple interesting microformatty things:
And lastly, I wanted to mention that I should hopefully have details on the next London Microformats vEvent very soon.
Based on feedback from the last event we held during London Web Week, Drew and I are planning a "Getting Started" event, with back-to-basics semantics and microformats implementations.
Are you a screen reader user, or know someone who is? Want to contribute to making the Beeb a more accessible place?
The BBC is looking for people to let them know what screen reader users hear when they visit the new Programmes pages, which just happen to contain the ever controversial abbreviation design pattern contained within the hCalendar microformat, or whether they expand and listen to title attributes and abbreviations at all.
Please pop on over to the BBC RadioLabs blog article and leave your feedback or get in touch if you would think you can help test!
I mentioned at the start of the year that we were planning to have another "Microformat vEvent" in the first quarter... well, slightly later than planned I'm pleased to announce that we're good to go and you can now sign up!
The event has been delayed so that we could take part in a new grander event which is London Web Week. It's going to be a solid week of all things webby, and includes other such highlights as @media London, BarCampLondon 4, a Web Standards Group event and a new one-day conference aimed at new comers who are just interested in or starting out in web development and design, called Web Roots. Even Pub Standards is sneaking in on the act (keep an eye on upcoming for the "The Great Pub Standards Heresy").
The full schedule of events is available here and I expect it'll expand to contain a few of the London user groups for various web... things... over the next few weeks.
So, back to the point of my post. Microformats vEvent!
The good news is, I've managed to twist the arms of a couple of nice folks to do some speaking for us. We've got Dan Brickley and Tom Morris. Surprisingly, both usually more aligned with the RDF camp rather than microformats - but I'm personally up for breaking down that wall (and I hope they are too) and seeing if we can't all "get along". So, with that in mind, they will each be taking on topics that look at microformats working along side other semantic web technologies in complementary ways.
Full details on what these guys will be talking about are again, on the sign-up page, as well where and when (The Yorkshire Grey Pub, Holborn, Tuesday 27th May, 7pm) you need to show up. Make sure you sign-up quickly though - we've only got a limited amount of space, and entrance is with ticket only.
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