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The clock is ticking, pounding in my brain. A reminder that day 2 of SXSW is complete. Las Vegas has opened the line on whether I make it to day 4 and the Internet Explorer 9 launch party.
We had another good day of promoting our #IE9party to the SXSW crowd.
It started with our T-shirt giveaway of the day. Based on the Lost World’s Fair’s site, featuring the work of Jason Santa Maria and others, we passed out 200 or so shirts in just over an hour. They’ve certainly been a hot giveaway so far, and we’re excited to give away three more shirts over the next few days.
As the shirts were being handed out we got down to serious business. Our first real panel of the week featured the topic of CSS implementation. Sylvain Galineau from the Internet Explorer engineering team represented IE on the panel (he’s on the far left). Sylvain is part of the CSS Working Group, and was part of a panel featuring Mozilla, Google, and Opera representatives who had the chance to debate things like the Box Model standard. As a non-CSS expert the discussion was actually pretty interesting – more formats and new standards = good, but more formats and new standards = hard. It was a great group who is working hard to deliver clearer standards to developers and designers across the web.
I caught up with Sylvain after the session to ask him a couple of questions. How does the IE team decide which standards to prioritize for, and how do we participate in the test cases submitted to the W3C? He was kind enough to give me some answers.
We have more panels coming up tomorrow: The Politics Behind HTML5, and HTML5? The Web's Dead, Baby. Check them out if you’re at SXSW, or leave your questions in the blog comments – we’ll track down Paul and Thomas for some interviews tomorrow after their sessions.
In the afternoon, we finally experienced the classic SXSW experience – totally having your cell network fail. The bad news: it happened while we were trying to give out our IE9 party Fast Access passes. The good news: we finally got our tweet out and had people rushing to our location (the GroupMe Grill) to get our exclusive Yeasayer, The Head and the Heart, and Fences concert passes. 25 more passes were given away – only two more days left to snag the Fast Access into the concert! Make sure you follow us on Twitter to get yours!
The rest of the day: Holy crowds Batman! It seemed like things doubled from Friday, both in number of people, and in, uh, interesting events.
I’ll just sign off my Saturday recap with this – a chipmunk in a garbage can, and a random unbranded SXSW flash mob. The things you see in Austin. Enjoy! (Back tomorrow with more)