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Last Thursday I went up to Edinburgh for the first Highland Fling conference, on progressive enhancement.

Firstly, a big thanks to Alan White for organising the conference, and of course to all the speakers.

Jeremy Keith kicked us off with an overview of progressive enhancement, paving the way for Mark Norman Francis to tie in graded browser support, as used by Yahoo!

Andy Budd brought CSS3 into the mix, talking about the “Future of CSS”, encouraging us to start making use of the parts which some browsers (essentially the major players other than Internet Explorer) already support; doing this will hopefully help to push the next CSS recommendation through, possibly in an intermediate step.

Drew McLellan delved into the possibilities of using microformats to throw in an API for our sites.

After a break for basking in the Edinburgh sunshine and eating lunch, Christian Heilmann took us through some principles of using Javascript and Ajax in the context of progressive enhancement, giving some great examples. James Edwards was hot on his heels with some warnings from the accessibility perspective - for example, the fact that screen readers partially support javascript means that our checks will detect the support and enable the functionality, but unfortunately they can’t handle a lot of the things which javascript can do.

Last but (as the old saying goes) by no means least, was Andy Clarke, encouraging us with ways to take things forward. A sneak preview of the new design for his website revealed his intention of using some of the CSS3 techniques to enhance the presentation in browsers which support them.

After a bit of Q&A, we piled off to the bar for a whisky or three. Photos to come…