Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Corblimey what a week and no mistake guv. (Sorry, still getting the last Lahndahn molecules out of my system.)

The Meffys

Firstly, on Tuesday, I attended a formal event on behalf of Opera as our Opera Mini mobile web browser was up for Best Mobile Application at the Mobile Entertainment Forum‘s Meffys awards. I’m not really a suit-and-tie business dinner type person, but duty called so I went along in my wedding-and-funeral suit for the onerous task of drinking free mojitos while listening to the host Hardeep Singh Kohli. (Lots of people said they found him too abrasive, but I thought he was a good choice.)

Lo and behold – we won! Feeling very proud and, forgetting my acceptance speech that our PR types had prepared, I clambered onto the stage and made an impromptu thankyou speech which would have the PR team having palpitations were it recorded anywhere, did a quick video interview for a journalist and took the coveted award home back for a couple of relaxed tie-less beers with David Storey and Chris Mills in the hotel bar.

@media

At media was primarily a great gathering of the clans—I thought that the line up was playing it safe (entirely understandable in the current climate). I [particularly enjoyed persuading 30 people away from some poncey overpriced South Bank bistro in favour of a Waterloo greasy spoon where they stayed open especially to serve us snake and pygmy pie with beans and chips and a pint of lager for under a tenner.

The best speech for me was Robin Christopherson’s, in which he discussed ARIA and CAPTCHA as well as phone accessibility. I made an unscheduled appearance on stage as the HTML 5 cowboy during Molly’s presentation and donated the backless faux-leather chaps to Chris Wilson of Microsoft who’s the co-chair of the W3C‘s HTML 5 working group. He said that he would pass them onto Ian Hickson. I hope that they do the rounds of HTML 5 movers-and-shakers.

Standards.next

On Saturday the first standards.next informal emerging tech bootcamp took place. I was delighted how it went, having co-organised it with Henny Swan. We cajoled a stellar line-up of speakers to sit in a friendly (but very hot and sticky) atmosphere and really get under the skin of HTML 5. I humbly thank every one of them.

Me

I over-ran on time without finishing my slides, discussing some myths that are causing unnecessary FUD and doing a basic demo of markup for a blog.

• Slides: HTML 5: Are you mything the point? (.ods, 1.8 M) (HTML 5 Myths: Video)
• HTML 5: Basic blog markup
• HTML 5: Basic blog markup, with IE styling trick
• HTML 5: Using multiple headers and footers for multiple blog posts
• HTML 5: Nested articles for comments
• HTML 5: Canvas game demo
• HTML 5 Forms demo

Remy Sharp

Remy demoed the state of play with the new JavaScript APIs. You can check out his HTML 5 JavaScript APIs slides and try his HTML 5 JavaScript demoes, or watch the HTML JavaScript: video of his presentation.

Dean Edwards

For the first half of Dean Edwards’ HTML5.js talk, most people couldn’t grasp the magnitude of what they were seeing. Dean was showing his new JavaScript library that plugs the holes in browsers’ HTML 5 implementations. If a browser does do something natively, ther library does nothing; otherwise it fills that gap—so now you can have Web Forms with all browsers, canvas in IE. As a bonus, it’s all keyboard accessible, everything looks like native UI controls and it even inherits the native Windows themes. I’m looking forward to helping beta test this baby.

Martin Kliehm

Martin showed several demoes of the new canvas element that blew my mind. I’d rather assumed that it was just for wiggly graphics and maybe on-the-fly graphing but Martin showed some combinations of canvas interacting with video (because once everything is in the browser rather than plugins, they can all talk to each other).

There is real potential for new interaction models for people with learning disabilities, older people and kids.

• Martin Kliehm: HTML 5 canvas slides
• Martin Kliehm: HTML 5 canvas links
• Martin Kliehm: HTML 5 canvas demo videos

Steve Faulkner

Steve discussed the accessibility issues of the HTML 5 spec and its relationship with ARIA. I came away from Steve and Martins’ talks convinced that the biggest barrier will be the lack of real support for canvas accessibility and commend Steve for fighting this in the Working Group. I shall be standing with him in future.

I want to thank all the speakers who volunteered to share their knowledge, passion and expertise with us, and thanks to all who attended, and interacted with all the speakers to help us firm up our knowledge.

Although there were some problems (heat, pillars in the way), the event went exactly as Henny and I hoped: a relaxed pub (£1.95 a pint of bitter and you can take your own sandwiches in!), short focussed speeches of 30 minutes so speakers don’t feel the need to pad and a genuinely interested crowd who participated rather than passively absorbed the information. This lady is an excellent example:

HTML 5 Doctor

I plugged it at @media and standards.next (and forgot to give out the moo cards), and we’ve launched the bare bones of it today – HTML 5 Doctor (named in homage to an early Zeldman feature called “Ask Dr. Web”).

High Standards t-shirts

If you got a freebie High Standards t-shirt from us at standards.next, please post a picture of you wearing it to Flickr and tag it highstandards, because I want to remember how lovely you are.

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