Last night was the third gathering of the Markup & Style Society, the social gathering thing that Dan and I created last year. In the past, we’ve kept things fairly social: given that Boston has a dearth of meetups available to those of us who fear the sunlight work on the web, we created M&SS to give people a chance to drink, eat, and network with like-minded people in the area.

But last night, we had people talkin’. And the talkin’, it was good:

• Some jerk with a robot fetish rambled on forOMGever about liquid layouts, and some strategies for making them bulletproof.
• Once everyone woke up from the first speaker’s snoozer, Dan took the stage and gave an amusing walkthrough of his love for grids, and getting them to rock in an em-based layout. His slides were hilarious, but the ensuing Q&A was especially great: a lot of people weighed in on the approach, and the discussion brought a lot of killer ideas to bear.
• Josh Porter gave an inspiring talk on what it means to be a craftsman. I’ve admired Josh’s work for some time now, but last night was the first I’d heard him speak. To say I was impressed would be an understatement: Josh is a talented presenter, and really conveyed an air of, well, craftsmanship during his short talk.
• Rounding out the evening was Scott Jehl from Filament Group, who talked about Filament’s approach to progressive enhancement. It’s obvious that they’ve put a lot of time and energy into their approach, and I’d recommend you check out their sandbox/lab. Brilliant stuff.

The space? Prime. Filament Group were incredibly gracious hosts, opening up their beautiful studio to nearly fifty Boston-area web nerds. So many thanks, Filament—you guys were incredible.

And Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and authors of indispensable tips for creating HTML-/CSS-based emails, donated beer, soda, and pizza, which was incredibly generous (and likely helped us stave off a riot of hungry geeks). And Adobe rounded out the Trifecta of Generosity by donating two copies of CS3 Web Premium to be raffled off, which likely eased the pain of my mini-presentation.

So thanks to Filament, Freshview, and Adobe, who were a large part of making the night a success. But what’s next? Well, as Dan’s suggested, last night was only the beginning of new heights of Awesome™ for our little meet-up. We’re hoping to make our society a little bit more formal in the future, adding proper workshops and other event-like things to the line-up. It’s going to be fun, so be sure to stay tuned.

But fear not, citizen: there will still be beer. Praise be.