I’m home a bit early from the Rich Web Experience today, having sat through only two presentations. I’m exhausted, after having gotten home past midnight last night, and given that my talk tomorrow is at 8:30am, I thought it wise to get home and get to sleep early.

I sat through Bill Scott‘s presentation on User Interface Anti-patterns, where he shows examples of bad user interface design on the Web. This was at times funny and at times sad (realizing that a lot of the mistakes were being made by Yahoo! properties). Still, it’s sometimes helpful to show examples of what not to do instead of what to do; there’s value in recognizing that you’re completely messing up because you’re doing something that someone else specifically said was dumb.

I’m bummed that I missed Alex Russell’s talk about standards and pragmatism. He echoes a lot of the sentiments I’ve written about previously. Sadly, I’m fighting a cold and my body just wouldn’t allow me to get up early enough to sit in, but I whole-heartedly agree with everything he talked about.

I did get a chance to Greg Wilkin‘s excellent presentation on Comet. I wrote a chapter on Comet in Ajax, 2nd Edition, but I still learned a lot from this talk. In the year since I wrote that chapter, there have been some serious advances, and Greg’s work on the Jetty web server in relation to its Comet capabilities is really impressive. I had the opportunity to catch up with Greg (and Joe Walker) after the session to talk briefly about other Comet-related stuff, like server-sent events. They’ve both done work that could really make server-sent events (currently only implemented in Opera 9.02 and higher) something to keep an eye on in the future (shameless plug: server-sent events are also covered Ajax, 2nd Edition).

Jesse James Garrett also stopped by to do a keynote talk after lunch (always a tough crowd). He did a great talk on user experience and why more isn’t always more. I also got to speak to him briefly afterwards and thanked him for coining the term “Ajax” so I could sell some books.

I’ve had a great time the past two days and there’s one day left. If you’re not at this event, make sure you’re at the next one.