Eclectic Brain Salad

Up again bright and early, and scooting down to the conference just in time to see John's quite hilarious introduction for Kelly Goto's keynote, involving coming over for the conference while leaving her 4 month oold daughter at home, expressing breastmilk and shipping it back to the US...

Kelly Goto - WorkFLOW

When she first started, I kinda though that it seemed a bit stale trawling out Kelly to talk about workflow again. I mean, her infamous book came out 8 years ago now, and she has been talking about this subject for a long time. However, the talk still seemed pretty fresh, useful and entertaining, and you really can't deny that her charisma shines through. I really enjoyed this session.

Gian Wild - WCAG 2

Having talked to Gian about her presentation the night before, I was really looking forward to getting another take on accessibility testing, legislation, etc. from another country's point of view. However I think at least a part of her talk went about things the wrong way. She covered some interesting points about WCAG 2, but I think the way she looked at the thickness of all the documents, and the complexity of finding information kind of make accessibility look a bit scarier than it is, which might scare people off a bit (I'm certainly not saying her points were wrong, but I think it could've been presented in somewhat of a more positive light). Her section at the end covering the differences between WCAG 1 and WCAG 2 was really useful and interesting.

Elliot Jay Stocks - Progressive Enhancement

I've known Elliot for a couple years now, but amazingly never had a chance to hear him speak before. I'm glad I did, because this designer's view of progressive enhancement was very useful, and was delivered very well. Elliot has a lot of charisma, and just enough bile and fire to create a bit of contension and get people thinking.

I agree with him that a lot of web design is really boring, and we should be trying to push the boundries of what we are doing. He also made the point that validation is irrelevant. Just at the point where Doug Schepers and I were about to start throwing things, he qualified his point ;-) He was really trying to say that validation is good for ensuring a valid DOM, debugging, etc., but when you are playing with experimental CSS 3 features, etc., and working with complex data-driven applications that feature a lot fo user-generated content, trying to make sites absolutely validate is not worth your while.

He also make a great point about web sites not needing to look the same across all browsers. I really appreciate this, after hearing too many designers go on about pixel-perfect designs, and their precous control. It is only natural that experiences should differ across different devices, as the context is different, and there are so many variables to consider (screen size, CPU power nd so many more). To try to enforce the same experience across different devices would be a really bad thing.

Lunchtime at Google

I had to run out of Elliot's session a few minutes early because I was meeting up with Pamela Fox to go and have lunch at the Google offices. They were very plush, as you may expect! She came to meet me and walked me over there, and we had a really good chat about developer evangelism and outreach techniques (she kind of does the same thing as I do, only for Google). The real crux of our conversation was talking about open standards education. She was really interested in getting involved with the Open Web Education Alliance efforts, as education is a real passion of hers. I was really interested in following up with her because I think Google has a lot to offer the open education movement, and her interests and background make her an ideal person to get involved.

I also had a chance to meet the Google Wave team, and chat to them about Opera support.

Christian Crumlish - Designing social interfaces

I managed to get back to the venue in time to see about half of Xian's talk. It was a really well-delivered look at patterns that work when designing web sites (with a slant towards social networks) and conversely, anti-patterns that really suck and don't work at all well. For example, breaking the purpose of e-mail by using it for notifications that don't allow you to reply is a really bad thing.

Lachlan Hardy - The open web

Lach was great - he presented a great look at the open web. including what constitutes an open standard (eg regulated by a standards body, not controlled by one company, spec is open, and anyone can contribute), some great ways in which you can use open standards, and some advice to the audience in how they can help to make the web more open. This last section included making sure all of their data is presented as HTML, not PDF or some other non-manipulable format, giving your site an API, making your URLs hackable, and using Microformats. I though it was great how he took a very dry, complicated subject with loads of politics surrounding it, and made it down to earth and accessible.

Slides please Lach!

Dan Hill - 15 years in

I've not come across Dan before, but my god he made my career sound boring ;-) He first gave us a potted history of him, from helping to create the BBC's web presence, designing dodgy band sites in the late nineties, and then more recently creating amazing digital architecture experiences with Arup. He made some really nice points about ubiquity and intelligent uses of connectivity in the urban space.

Evening

After the conference was over, I went back to collect my family from the hotel, and we headed over to the end of event party. It was in a venue that doesn't allow kids in, so I went to find some people to eat with, and we went off for a lovely seafood dinner with Leslie, Shaun, Daniel from Opera, and Doug Schepers. Incredibly nice, and we had great conversation, but the jetlag again got the better of me, and I was falling asleep by about 9.30!

I was a bit gutted about missing the after show party, but I still had a really great time! Thanks to you all for making it such a special conference.

Hello everyone,

Today sees 2 fabulous new dev.opera.com articles published:

1. Setting web type to a baseline grid, by Craig Grannell - another in Craig's classic series covering modern web design basics.

2. Supporting IE with conditional comments, by our very own Bruce Lawson. In this 2008 remix of his classic conditional comments article, Bruce gives a modern perspective on using IE conditional comments sensibly to support older versions of IE without resorting to CSS hacks.

Bruce also held the fort on dev.opera.com admirably while I was on paternity leave for 2 weeks, publishing another 3 great new articles:

3. The freelancing business part 2: budgeting your projects, by R Blank. Part 2 of R's 6 part series on the business of web design/software development freelancing

4. Rich HTML editing in the browser, part 1, by Olav Junker Kjaer. Part 1 of Olav's series on rich HTML editing using designMode, contentEditable, etc.

5. Introduction to WAI-ARIA, by Gez Lemon. A milestone article - Gez delivers the most complete article yet on ARIA basics, helping to demystify it a lot. We will follow this up with more accessibility gems in the near future.

I hope you enjoy these - let me know if you have any comments, or thoughts on articles you'd like to see on dev.opera.com!

Hi folks - it's been a while, so I thought I'd add a little post about an exciting new series we've got coming up on dev.opera.com. I've got my friend R Blank, from renowned LA-based interactive consultancy Almer/Blank to write a series of articles covering the business side of web/interactive freelancing, and they're turning out really nicely. Check out the first part, on pricing!

Later parts will cover other subjects such as project management, contracts, and budgeting.

This was an exciting conference for me - not only was it held in Edinburgh, one of my favourite cities, but it was also the first real proper conference I have ever spoken at! I would like to say a big thank you from the heart to Alan, Dave, Roan, and everyone else who helped pull this together, for looking after us so well. It was a really great conference, and I think the discussions were very useful and rewarding. I would also like to say a big thanks to the other speakers - Paul, Norm, Christian, Gareth, Aral and Simon - for being such lovely people and giving me encouragement and support (well, Christian mainly mocked me and told bad jokes, but I know he means well ;-)

Wednesday April 4th

After getting some work done and dropping our son off at his grandparents house for few days, we (we being the delectable Kirsty and I) made our way up to Edinburgh on the train. I fortunately managed to find a seat with a power socket, so I could do some more work on my presentation. It is amazing how many mistakes there are to fix and tweaks there are to make, even after going through the presentation material several times!

After getting to Edinburgh, we got a taxi over to the wonderful luxury apartment (bigger than our whole house...) that we shared with Simon, and Aral and Stephanie for the duration. After saying hi and stopping for a brew, we made our way over to a really nice curry house for the speakers dinner, where we ate an enormous amount of spicy food with the organizers and the other speakers. Yum.

Thursday April 5th

The big day! We got there with a few minutes to spare, got settled in, listened to Alan introduce the day, and then it was time for our compère, Mr Paul Boag, to take the stage. He explained the format for the day, which really worked in my opinion - I'd like to see it used more at future conferences. Basically, each talk lasted for about 40 minutes. During this time, Paul wrote down some of his own thoughts and questions, and also collected questions from the audience via paper, text, and Twitter. At the end of the sessions, he interviewed each speaker using those questions. It made for some really nice discussions, and also cut out that horrible thing you normally get at conferences where someone will stand up and ask a painfully specific long winded question that is not of much interest to anyone else except them, and lasts half as long as the whole talk itself!

The first speaker up was Norm.

Mark Norman Francis - The browser and before

Norm gave a very interesting account of the history of the web, leading up to the present day. It was a very fitting first talk for the day, which set the scene nicely. He went through the really early days of the Internet, including ARPANET, early work by Joseph Lechleider, Tim Berners Lee and his work at CERN, early clients such as Gopher and NCSA Mosaic, and how Netscape and MS started and finished the browser wars. He also looked at more recent developments, including Firefox, Ajax, and frameworks and libraries. A very interesting statement that he rounded off his talk with is "The Web IS change" - referring to developer knowledge and skillsets. One very amusing piece of information that I never knew before is that Joseph Lechleider's original name for what became the Internet was "The Intergalactic Computer Network" - this guy certainly aimed high ;-)

Christian Heilmann - Sharing the joy; building badges for distribution

Christian always managed to deliver a good talk; today was certainly no exception. His talk mostly centered on how we can improve distribution of data through badges and APIs. The success of a lot of modern web apps is down to how you can distribute your data on to other sites by use of badges, eg Flickr and Youtube. The modern web is a web of data, and people want to be free to distribute their data. He talked about how we can use this data better, and how we should think about allowing people more power to do this more easily, if we are actually involved in creating APIs.

Gareth Rushgrove - Being a first class web citizen

Gareth's talk was a very interesting step through how to take advantage of some of the lesser known features of the Web, as well as some good tips for maximising efficiency of APIs. He started by stating that some people browse the Web using a web browser, but somme people don't - they use code. Some people aren't even people - they are robots (either physical robots, or automated programs such as web spiders) or even rabbits (the Nabaztag, anyone?) So what is a designer to do?

The answer - Understand APIs, to make it as easy as possible for you to manipulate the web of data we now deal with. "The API is the product."

First of all, make better use of HTTP. There are the GET and POST methods that everyone knows, but what about HEAD, PUT, TRACE, DELETE and OPTIONS? These could do some work for you (eg authentication) that you'd otherwise have to put on a higher layer of the stack. Why do this work twice?

Next, understand status codes better. Everyone knows 404 and 500, but what about the 200 success code, or the 503 service unavailable code?

Next he covered understanding URLs, and the fact that URL design is becoming more important. URLs are an important part of the UI of your application - they are the entry point to a site for a visitor, and are also a logical navigation tool if done right.

Lastly, he gave some rules for APIS. They should be:

1. Proddable - eg you can use Curl to query APIs, to find out things about the data they carry, etc.
2. Hackable - eg can you replace parts of the URL to get to different pages?
3. Multilingual - some you can convert between different data types etc
4. Open
5. Transparent
6. Obvious - document your APIs! Don't make people guess how to use them.

Lunch

Lunch was fairly uneventful, and it gave me some time to gather up some courage for my talk, which was coming next!

Me! - The mobile perspective

I think my talk went fairly well, especially for my first conference speaking engagement, and a few people said they though it went great afterwards. Everyone laughed at my jokes, and I didn't seem to stumble on my words, or forget anything. Plus it was entertaining freaking Paul out during the interview section, by lounging on the sofa in a kind of pseudo-porn star pose ;-)

I went through the basics of how the mobile web development landscape differs from "normal" web development, and what extra considerations you need to make, then I looked at device constraints and advantages, and some techniques for optimizing mobile sites. It gave me lots of good opportunities to plug Opera products, and the Web standards curriculum. And the interview section afterwards was useful, with some good discussion going about how to sell the mobile web to clients.

If you want a copy of my slides, e-mail me at cmills [at] opera [dot] com. Also check out my Think Vitamin article on mobile web development.

Aral Balkan - Barenaked Flash: Dispelling myths and building bridges

As always, Aral proved to be a very entertaining speaker, full of charisma and insight. I've seen him speak many times, and never seen him give a bad talk. Aral shares my interest in trying to get the Flash and standards communities to work more closely together, and that was the basic gist of this talk - he showed what is available in the Flash world these days, and debunked a load of myths, for example Flash being inaccessible (there are steps you can take these days to make Flash more accessible) and Flash being proprietary/closed (it start off like that, but with the amount of open source tools available these days, it is anything but - the actual Flash player is the only thing Adobe strictly controls.) He ended with a nice comment about how to teach Flashers better practices learned from the standards world - don't just stand around and moan at them - engage and educate them, and hopefully they can do the same to you.

Simon Willison - Comet: Moving towards a real time web

To round off the day, Simon presented on Comet which is a blanket term for any technique that involves the server pushing events on to connected browsers. Examples you can see today include Google Mail, the Google Chat browser window, and Google Spreadsheets (try opening two instances of a Google spreadsheet on different computers and making some updates, and you'll see the updates occur on both instances in real time.)

There was early Comet style functionality as far back as Netscape 1.1, in the form of client pull and server push, but achieving Comet across the Web wasn't really explored until later on. Simon explained that achieving it really was a grim, harsh battle between the developers and the browser - to illustrate this, he used a hilarious movie poster of "Zeppelin versus Pterodactyls"!

There were a series of problems in winning the battle:

1. The first major issue is IE not making xhr:responseText available until after the page has finished loading. This was overcome using a hidden iFrame.
2. The next two problems were the throbber (ie the graphic that pulses while a request is loading - this never seems to stop if you are you are doing Comet-style activity) and the click (ie the click that happens after a request loads.) These were overcome using a COMPLETELY undocumented ActiveX extendsion called htmlfile. Not sure how - I was a bit lost by this point in the presentation!
3. Next problem - proxies/firewalls stopping the flow of the requests. This is overcome using the long polling technique, which keeps pinging the server, and then intermittantly closing and reopening the connection, to keep the data flowing.
4. Lastly, there is a problem caused by the 2 connection limit inherent in IE (IE8 apparently will have a 6 connection limit, making this problem go away.)

And this is just on the client-side. The server-side problems are much worse! Standard servers such as IIS and Apache are just not set up to handle thousands of requests at once, but there are solutions available to this in various languages, such as Twisted in Python. And there are also standard protocols created for Comet, such as Bayeux and cometd. The future is looking bright for Comet too, with built in support for it in HTML5 - <event-source src="/comet">

Simon rounded off the talk by showing a demo of how you can build up a Comet application in under 5 minutes. Great talk.

Saturday and Sunday proved to be just as much of a blast as the first couple of days. I actually managed to make a couple of sessions on Sunday.

Jon Gruber and Michael Lopp - Blood, Sweat and Fear; Good Design Hurts.

This was a fantastic presentation; Michael Lopp indulged in lots of swearing, but lots of good commentary on design, and fear of blue and ponies, and how Apple do things. Jon Gruber then took over, talking about design, and how great design has got to be risky, and sometimes maligned...you need these things to evolve, and innovate.

Andy Olio - Worst. Website. ever.

This was one of the funniest talks I've ever seen. A web designer and a VC introducing various speakers to come up on stage to talk about their web site ideas - the worst, most inane/amoral/derivative ideas they could come up with.

Andy first listed some of the biggest web site failures in history.

* kozmo.com - $280 million burned through in 3 years
* pets.com $130 million
* boo.com 188 million in 6 months

He then listed the categories the sites would be judged by, and gave examples:

* inane ideas
- digiscents - savor the world - web pages that send you smells
- 3D mailbox - makes your inbox look like miami beach. ludicrous.

* derivative ideas
- look at techcrunch for a week, eg facebook for senior citizens

* just plain evil
- goto.com - let people bid for top search results, text ad links
- Jigsaw - buy and trade business cards

Some of my favorite ideas presented:

* babiesandpuppiesforrent.com - the only people that wanted to rent the children are people who should never be allowed access to children, and puppies think children are delicious
* thinkwidow.com - dating site for newly widowed people
* Image search for the blind - providing voice overs to describe images on the web...for the blind people.
* Mommerce. The future of the future of commerce. MMOs. Take world of warcraft and add e-commerce shops to it, to ensure that players never have to stop playing. Ever. Turn bricks and mortar into clicks and mordor

In the evening, I popped over to Ms Jen's wine and cheese party, talked to Rob Weychert, Jon Hicks, saw the new generation of flathicks, and then went over to the Austin Barcamp with my Opera cohorts Phillip, David and Lawrence, to present a talk on Opera technologies and future standards, which went down pretty well. Phillip then did the first ever presentation ever in the USA, of the upcoming Opera 9.5 release. Stay tuned! The talks were made infinitely more fun by free beer, and a senior W3C guy playing blues guitar while we spoke.

After speaking, we watched the live band at the Barcamp for a while, drank more free beer, and then met up with the rest of the Opera possee. After driving around for ages trying to find a party, I got bored and led us over to a different bar. I had a "couple more light ales", and remember talking to a whole load of lovely people, including John Resig, Glenn Jones, Tristan Turpin, and PPK...after that, it got a bit hazy... ;-)

Sunday was hard work.

I got up, manned the Opera booth for a while, talking to some really nice people, then I had lunch with Phillip and David in a sleazy dive bar with blacked out windows and Van Halen on the stereo. The food was beautiful!

I then headed over to the booth again for a while, then went over to the Fire Eagle party. It was nice to talk to Tom Coates and the other guys about how Opera can do cool things with Fire Eagle...I then started to feel very tired, and went back to the hotel for a 39 minute power nap, before bowling started.

Our bowling team sucked, but hey, it was fun! Norm, Alun Rowe, Ben Ward, Lloydi, Aslan and Myself didn't win. We didn't get close to winning ;-)

We did have fun though. My team mates managed to enrage me enough to do better by plastering me with IE7 and Silverlight stickers ;-)

I also had some wonderful conversations with people about my web standards curriculum, including WaSP EduTF folk like Steph, Gareth and Aaron. We're taking web standards education to the masses! If anyone knows a university, or any other institution or company that needs some web standards education material, get in touch! I'm creating the definitive web standards training course, and it's getting some backing from big hitters! Mail us if you want more info, and keep checking http://dev.opera.com for more updates.

After the bowling fun was over, I went to bed for 9 hours. Hot damn I needed that!