The final day of the conference already! Today, I attended the following sessions:

• PHP Web Services, presented by Ilia Alshanetsky | slides here
• Separating Content and Design, presented by Daniel Udey
• Bring Your Own PEAR, presented by Lukas Smith | slides here

Having seen Ilia speak yesterday, I knew I was in for some serious learning! His presentation covered REST, XML, the DOM, XMLRPC and SOAP (can I squeeze any more acronyms in there?!), all delivered with authority.

Kalan and I split up for the next session. I decided that I needed to attend a talk that was a little less brain challenging so that I could remain engaged for the remainder of the day. It worked! I was fully attentive and interested in Daniel's talk, even though I found little new information in it (though there were a few cases where I learned the reasoning behind certain CSS tricks, which made me understand the tricks more fully).

I posed a question and a statement in this talk, both of which I felt went unanswered by the speaker. My question was about CSS hacks and IE7. Something I read recently suggested that IE7 will support child selectors, and if this is the case, then CSS hacks that rely on child selectors will cease to function in IE7. Is this true, or did I read incorrectly? No answer was provided. My statement was about "outside of the box" design. Daniel presented several examples from the CSS Zen Garden website showcasing extreme design, such as this "Killer Style" one. Daniel kept saying that there wasn't really any use for such designs. (If this is the case, then why use these as examples?) Outside the box design is very appropriate for entertainment websites: movies, music, theatre, etc. I put up my hand and made this suggestion, but it sparked no further discussion, from speaker or audience.

In the end, I felt that Daniel's presentaion was good, but not great. He seemed to constantly refer to the clock to see if he could call it quits.

I was happy that Lukas Smith's talk got moved to the afternoon as this no longer conflicted with Ilia's web services session. I enjoyed this talk quite a bit, and was surprised that it was sparsely attended. The discussion part of the session was largely used up by one gentleman with many questions (that were somewhat irrelevant to the rest of us, sigh), but this didn't detract from my enjoyment of the talk. I'm very interested in PEAR these days, so this one seemed tailormade for me. I also enjoyed Lukas' friendly manner.

On this final day of the conference, Kalan and I enjoyed our lunch at the same table as Marcus Börger, Dan Scott, Lukas Smith, Derick Rethans and George Schlossnagle–some of the superstars of PHP!