Attended my first @media conference this week, all really good talks that left me with lots to try and research.
Fridays keynote was excellent, Andy Clarke spoke about hard-boiled web design. The idea was that by designing and developing to include the weaker browsers we’re putting limits on what we can achieve. Andy’s approach is to design to the strengths of the browser, the experience then in a webkit browser can be much richer than that of even Firefox. The key is that the while the experiences aren’t identical we need to stop seeing that as a problem or limitation.
As an approach hard-boiled design sat well with the other development talks at @media, it often isn’t feasible to use the updated capabilities in CSS3 and HTML5 because of the range of support, but Andy’s method would avoid that issue.
Highlights
The title highlights is a little misleading, I’m just going to list the bits that the conference really left me wanting to try out.
- Putting external scripts in closures, for example ad and tracking code provided by third parties
- Geolocation functions and how they take us closer to ubiquitous and context aware computing
- Testing sites on some mobile browsers… if only I had Snow Leopard on this machine
- PhoneGap to look into some app development
- Node.js
- HTML5: Validation markup and how we can use this in our JS
- HTML5: Local storage and manifest files
- CSS3: animations, even though they’re only webkit at the moment
- Non-blocking JS includes