Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Metaphwoar! 2011 last month. The brief is very loose: talk about anything related to the web, but use metaphor (similes are also valid). I chose to talk about what I do, trying to define what it is — but in a very lighthearted way, and in less than 15 minutes.
I enjoyed giving this talk, and the whole event is worth a watch. You can see all the other videos on Vimeo. Bonus: See if you can spot the point where I completely forgot what to say next. It’s quite early on…
This weekend I attended the London Web Standards group’s State of the Browser, a one-day event with representatives of many of the major browser makers giving us status reports on their products. Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Blackberry were all there; a member of the IE team was due to show but had to pull out for personal reasons (he viewed the live stream and answered some questions from home). The notable absence was Safari, whose community engagement is really not good enough.
There were long talks and shorter breakout sessions, as well as plenty of time to socialise; the LWS must really be congratulated on organising such a good event. There was plenty of news and talking points throughout the day — far too much, really, for me to write here, so I’ll just write up notes of what I found most interesting to me.
Last night I had the pleasure of giving a lightning talk — my first public talk — at the London Web Standards meeting. The talk had the title “How We’ll Lay Out Websites In 2016″, and was a look at the three layout modules offered for discussion by the W3C: Flexible Box Layout, Template Layout, and Grid Positioning.
The video is now available to watch (I was concerned that I’d talked too quickly as I was a little nervous, but it doesn’t seem too bad!), and my slides are also online; both are embedded below.
A few weeks ago I saw Anna Debenham at London Web Standards give a hugely inspiring talk on the state of web development education. She later gave a briefer version of the talk at the Drumbeat Festival. I urge you to at the very least look at the overview and slides of the shorter talk, but if you can put aside 25 minutes you should really watch the video of the full one.
Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.
One of the new features already announced for IE8 is WebSlices; essentially, the ability to subscribe to any part of a web page, even if it doesn’t have an RSS feed. It sounds somewhat similar to Firefox’s Microsummaries feature*, although it’s a) easier to implement, b) more flexible, and c) not buried in the browser where no-one could ever find it.
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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