I am a Web Designer

In the dim and distant past of one year ago, ems where viewed as the holy-grail of measurement units for designing accessible websites. An EM being a relative value meant that if the text was resized by the viewer via the browser, the layout would expand in proportion to the resized text. A tricky skill to acquire and in the case of an image-rich website, a very tricky method to implement.
But along came IE7, where the browser’s resize function didn’t just apply itself to text, but to images and indeed the entire webpage. The text was no longer resized, the page was zoomed. I thought this combination of genius and common sense was inspired, but perhaps because it was a Micro$oft product it was largely ignored by the web design community at large. Of course IE7 borrowed heavily from the Opera browser, which had been using its own page zoom since the dawn of time – perhaps for so long that people had forgotten it even existed. But now, the mighty, all conquering, all important Firefox in its manifestation 3 has arrived (the RC1 has anyway) and suddenly there is murmuring amongst the design community that this zoom feature is really nice and might even be a good thing.
What it does mean is that in the very near future, 90% (or so) of online users will be using the page-zoom method to enlarge their text. So the humble EM unit will be a far less significant choice when it comes to webpage design. In theory, using pixels as a unit of choice with the occasional percentage spacing for elasticity might provide more control over a sites’ design than the current and at times painful method of today’s EM based layout.

Finally @media have rid themselves of the web 2.0 look – gone are the reflections and 3D ‘soft-furnishing’ lettering – rejoice! Although I’m not sure about the amateur indy rock band look…
As usual I won’t be at @media but I will look forward to any podcasts of the event that make there way to the web for us less fortunate souls.