Yesterday the founding congress of the Guild of Front-Enders was held in Amsterdam. I was in the audience to listen to a few great speakers. After the congress the general members’ meeting was held to vote for the ideas and the board of the Guild.

The congress

Stephen Hay (Cinnamon Interactive) was the first speaker, and held a great presentation about the Web Guidelines. He noted the importance, and gave a five tips to easily follow 80 percent of the guidelines.

Also, there were some code reviews. I saw two (there were three in total), the ones of Arjen Geerse (Lost Boys) and Tom Greuter (info.nl). Both they presented how they organize the front-end within the companies they work for. In my opinion they have clear and good ways to develop internally, and for me as freelancer it was great to see a bit of how it works in larger companies.

The two panels of non-front-enders (managers and clients) were quite interesting. Unfortunately I haven’t a summary of the thoughts (if someone has: it is really good content to publish, so don’t wait!). Bobby van der Sluis (Refunk) presented his ideas on how the GvFE could be there for Flash designers and developers.

The general members’ meeting

The general members’ meeting gave some new ideas and points on how the Guild will take its next steps. The name (Guild of Front-Enders) will be compared with other, new names. Members can vote for the name they want. There will be a working group for certification that will have a clear proposal before April 1st 2008 (no joke). And that was only the policy of the Guild.

The board was also a point. As there were rumors about the chairmanship, all members were allowed to also vote for the chairman they wanted. Peter-Paul Koch eventually made it to chairman.

So, what about me being the future?

The chairman is not the only board member, there were three candidate board members as well, and I was one of them. The three of us were all allowed to introduce ourselves to everybody. My introduction began with: ‘I am young, I am the future.’. I wanted to make clear that I do not only want to care about the future of the Guild itself, but also about front-end developers in general. There are many professionals, but there will always be a need for new talent. With my participation in the Education Commission, besides being part of the board, I think I can care about that. By the way, I was voted right into the board.

More photos can be found in my Flickr set.

I was pleased when Tony and JD mailed me a few weeks ago, and asked if I wanted to be a judge at the CSS Off competition. Of course I said yes, and just all judges were announced.

There are six other judges, including Tony and JD themselves. Together we will look at the entries people can build within 24 hours. Next Saturday is the first competition we’ll judge together, feel free to attend. All you have to do is pick the design and code your best markup and style you can.

More important than winning, is sharing the knowledge we and all participants have. All entries are being commented with good and interesting points we came through. Also thinks we didn’t like are added, with some ideas how we would do it. Have a look at the previous results to see how extensive the entries are being judged.

I just came home from a meeting at Mirabeau where the Education Commission discussed about the plans and ideas. The Education Commission is part of the Guild of Front-Enders.

Before we really did something, there was pizzatime. Always good, in my opinion :) Therefore I would like to thank Wybe and Martin (employees at Mirabeau) to make that all possible.

I can’t tell much about our plans and ideas, it’s better to have that as a surprise. The plans are really concrete, so that’s pretty good (so no bla bla, but really doing something). At the congress of the GoFE next week Robert Jan (our chairman) will tell everybody in a few minutes what we want to achieve.

For the people who would love to see how it looked like over there at Mirabeau, here are some photos I took.

…but it did not work in browsers other than Firefox. I looked at my code, it seemed to be okey. I couldn’t use Firebug, since the script worked in Firefox.

After a bit longer looking at my code I found the problem. I used a semicolon inside the string for the CSS. It looked a bit like this: elm.style.display = "none;";. After deleting the semicolon it all worked as intended. A bit weird you cannot use it in this kind of statements, but can when you use the cssText property. And also since you must use it in CSS too.

I made a page in my codex that illustrates the problem. In Firefox it works like expected. IE6 and IE7 both do absolutely nothing useful (they give errors) and other browsers make the text white, but the background not black.