Opera Developer News

Spent a delightful evening at the Leaf Tea Shop & Bar in Liverpool last night as part of the Speak the Web series of "gig" style events.

The atmosphere was nice and relaxed, with a little bit of banter provided by the speakers and the likes of Andy Clarke heckling from the front row. Jake Smith gave a good overview of typography and the web – with a bit of an 8-bit feel thrown in for good measure (I'm sure Jake would appreciate the collection of retro pixel fonts I made ages ago, listed on our @font-face Web Fonts resources post) – and Simon Collison took us on a whirlwind tour of modernism, post-modernism, semiotics and his memories of art school to provide an insight into his practice as a web designer.

For my own part, I gave an overview of some of the cool new things in HTML5. As ever, I overran "slightly", but our gracious organisers – hat tip to Rich Clark and Dan Donald – were kind enough to indulge me...I can only justify it by saying that there's so much interesting stuff and potential in the new standard that I simply had to convey my enthusiasm for it to the audience.

Here is my presentation, available on Slideshare.

And the various demonstrations I ran through:

• My variations on HTML5 forms: new general input types, date/time input types and validation examples
• Paranoid 0.2 classic game lookalike in <canvas>
• Particle party using <canvas>
• Appropriate use of <canvas> on Filament Group's Accessible Charts & Graphs jQuery plugin
• All the examples from the Introduction to HTML5 video article on dev.opera