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…

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.

After a fun introduction from Terence Eden, the first full session was by Michael Mahemoff of Google. He showed that Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine is now some 700% faster than when it was first released, and then mentioned a few features that have just landed (or are about to land) in the browser: the HTML5 File System, Shared Workers, and Server-Sent Events. The big round of applause, though, was reserved for speech input in forms, which is supported in Chrome (dev channel) right now; you just need to add the attribute x-webkit-speech:

<input type="text" x-webkit-speech>

He also showed off the Chrome Web Store and a neat little utility, Appmator, which you can use to easily publish your own app. His slides are available online, but they only work in WebKit browsers. :(

Next was Paul Rouget of Firefox, showing off a load of neat demos of the capabilities of open web media, many of which can be found at Mozilla’s Web O’ Wonder. He also demonstrated them all running perfectly on Firefox Mobile, which pretty much has feature parity with its desktop sibling — indeed it may even have more, as it includes the Notifications API which isn’t in Firefox desktop yet. There’s a cool little dashboard demo which showcases many of Firefox 4’s new features, and an impressive mobile version which doesn’t seem to be online yet.

He then talked about Firefox’s new release schedule, which is moving to quarterly releases meaning that Firefox 7 could be out by the end of this year. Features planned for inclusion in Firefox 5 include Web Sockets, Server-Sent Events, the Fullscreen API, Notification API, and an Account Manager. No mention of what Firefox 6 may have, but Firefox 7 may include an update to the Gecko engine.

Chris Mills of Opera was next. In his talk, A Matter of Good Form, he focused a lot on Opera’s implementation of HTML5 Forms, which it must be said are streets ahead of anyone else. I’m putting together a couple of posts on forms, so I’ll save discussion of this until that time.

After lunch there were some breakout sessions to choose from. I attended first Google’s Malte Ubl’s session, Performance Optimization for HTML5 Apps. In fact this was a really good overview of performance best practices, not limited to only HTML5 apps. One of his points was to let the browser take as much of the work from the JS engine as it can; use CSS transitions instead of JS animations where possible, as this uses the browser’s hardware acceleration and therefore less processor resource. Another was to interact with the DOM as few times as possible, and to also to group those interactions; if your JS is currently structured Read-Write-Read-Write, changing it to Read-Read-Write-Write means less DOM interaction, and increased speed.

An interesting aside: he said that this generation’s equivalent of zoom:1 (which triggers hasLayout in older versions of IE) could be:

E { transform: translate3D(0,0,0); }

This triggers hardware acceleration on elements which don’t already use it (in Safari, at least). I think this may have been partly a joke, however!

The second session was The Dos and Don’ts on the Mobile Web by Blackberry’s Mathew Staikos, which covered some similar ground but had more good tips, notably not to use position:fixed with WebKit Mobile — it can cause a complete repaint after every scroll action! Also, use touch events where possible as they’re faster than click, which has to wait anywhere up to 500ms to see if the action will be doubleclick before firing. He also used a tool I hadn’t seen before which provides information about the version of WebKit you are running. His colleague Sanyu Kiruluta then gave us a very rapid overview of the Blackberry App World (link is Windows-only) and their tool WebWorks, which is similar to Phonegap.

To round the afternoon off we had a Q&A with all of the main speakers, then off to the pub for a free beer courtesy of BlackBerry. Thanks, BlackBerry, and thanks again to everyone else who organised, spoke and attended.

NB: I’ll update this post with more slides and videos from the event as they become available.

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.

Microsummaries work by creating an XML file which is polled on a regular basis by the user agent to check for updates; WebSlices work on the same principal, although they leverage the power of Microformats instead. A very simple WebSlice could be marked up like so:

<div class="hslice" id="myid">
<h2 class="entry-title">Title</h2>
<p class="entry-content">Lorem ipsum dolor</p>
</div>

If that code was embedded in a page and you were using IE8, the notifier would light up and alert you to the presence of the WebSlice, allowing you to subscribe (see image below). Every hour (or time period specified) the browser would check that code to see if it had been updated, and alert you accordingly. Pretty slick.

The entry-title and entry-content classes are taken from the hAtom Microformat, which is also a good move on the IE team’s part, as it shows they are taking notice of movements in semantic markup. It also means hSlice can be implemented into other Microformat tools; Daniel Glazman has already put together a Firefox/Greasemonkey add-on.

You can read more about WebSlices and learn how to implement them on your site by downloading the White Paper. IE comes in for a lot of stick from the web dev community — myself included — but I’m happy to say I think they’ve got this one right.

* I should mention that this also sounds pretty similar to Apple’s Web Clip function, although I haven’t had the opportunity to try that out yet.

Sessions which I found particularly interesting should be covered in more detail later, and I’ll update here as I find more presentations.

Designing our way through data (Jeff Veen)

How good design can make sense of data (and how bad design can complicate it too much), and using user feedback to make data findable.

For example: BBC and Edenbee (Tom Cartwright & Clare Roberts, and James Box)

On the challenges posed by redesigning on of the most visible homepages in the world, and on how to build a social community.

Getting your hands dirty with HTML5 (James Graham & Lachlan Hunt)

Introducing the new structural elements (which I will definitely write more about later), and what HTML5 you can use right now.

Underpants over my trousers (Andy Clarke)

What inspiration we can take from the narrative devices of comics? Andy Clarke is always an entertaining speaker, and this was no exception — although I’d seen some of it before.

Details make the difference (Dan Rubin)

One of the best and most practical of the sessions I saw; tips on how to make compelling designs and details.

Professional front end engineering (Nate Koechley)

A call for professionalism in the web development community. Very interesting, although recapped some of the points from last year’s talk.

Building on the shoulders of giants (Jonathan Snook)

How to make practical use of frameworks, libraries and APIs in your work. Revealed some new tools which I will check out.

For example: The Guardian and Dopplr (Marc Pacheco and Matt Biddulph)

Similar to the earlier ‘For example’ session; a look at the practicalities of building a large content portal and a social community. The latter displayed how to take advantage of the many APIs that exist.

WAI-ARIA – it’s easy (Steve Faulkner)

I didn’t know what WAI-ARIA was before this session, but this was a comprehensive and practical introduction.

Global design: characters, language, and more (Richard Ishida)

Another very practical session, which I really wish I’d taken more notes on. Why character encoding matters and how you can use it.

There were three presentations; the first, by Cyril Doussin, introduced the subject and explained the core concepts behind it; the ways in which users find your content (or product) and how you can make it easier for them.

Next, Stuart Colville showed practical ways to make the content on your site more findable, from design through to mark-up, style and behaviour. He raised the interesting point that tagging is better than categorising, as categories tend to be fixed whereas content changes over time as information evolves; time for me to start using WordPress’ tagging function.

Finally, Steve Marshall showed off Yahoo!‘s latest project, Fire Eagle (currently invitation only; I was handed one at @media today), which is a service that lets you update your physical location across multiple sites and services. It’s pretty impressive in theory, but the fact that I can only currently update from the desktop means I am limited to home or work, mostly.

The whole evening was nicely balanced to appeal to a broad range of skills and knowledge, and had the right mix of theory, practice, and showing off. I’m aiming to get more involved in organising future events, and I hope to be part of more quality events like this one.

Some interesting stuff about HTML 5 to discuss shortly.

First (and foremost), it wasn’t really about Microformats. The first speaker talked about RDFa and GRDDL, the second about RDFa and FOAF.

Second, the presumption was that we had an extremely high level of technical knowledge; a presumption that wasn’t true, in my case at least. I’m fairly new to Microformats but I have a pretty good idea of what they’re about; both talks went over my head anyway. And my poor wife, who’s learning about them for the first time, had no idea what was going on.

The description of the event said:

We hope that no matter your experience level, you’ll find the evening informative, enjoyable and inspiring.

I didn’t. In fact, it may well have been counter-productive for me; it took a subject I’m excited about, and made it sound complicated and boring.

I’m sure that some people would have got a lot out of it — the man next to me who’s studying for his pHD in artificial intelligence certainly seemed to enjoy it — but I think the organisers should have been more honest about the technical knowledge required, and saved some attendees a bit of time.

I did get a book for asking a question, however, so it wasn’t a total loss.