If you were speaking about at a conference about HTML 5, and some guy stuck a video camera in your face and asked you what the exciting parts of it are, you’d say canvas and video, wouldn’t you? I know I would.
This fool didn’t, however.
I flew in, dazed and confused, on Tuesday night and only managed to see the first morning of OSCON before I had to crash for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but I did get to see Jono Bacon present on building communities around Ubuntu – very relevant to my line of work and very interesting.
Tuesday night saw me in an iridescent lime-green t-shirt at the Linux Fund party, where I drank more than I should have (but not as much as Stuart Langridge, so that was alright).
Thursday saw me zipping up to Stanford University with the Sasquatch-wrestling John Foliot, where I gave a lunchtime presentation on HTML 5 (.ODP, 2MB) which was very well-attended. I also got to meet James Craig, after working with him online for a few years.
Then it was back to San Jose for dinner at the invitation of Google. It was odd to be surrounded by giants of the Open Source world, many of whom I’d never heard! Likewise, one guy I was talking to was developing a browser but had never heard of Zeldman—odd how two worlds coincide while rarely touching (Langridge is the only guy I can think of who passes easily between them). Swag was excellent at the Google party: an unlocked developer’s G1 Android phone. I can’t wait to get back to the UK to try it and download Opera Mini for Android.
Having woken up feeling fine, through the clever gambit of not drinking loads the night before, it was time to wander in and give my presentation. I felt fine until I was told that I was moved to the huge space where they do the keynotes because so many people had signed up to see me (about 120 expressions of interest).
My nerves were further shot when I tried to edit out a joke that I decided at the last minute wasn’t going to work, and Open Office crashed—2 minutes before I was due to start, leaving me to do ctrl-alt-delete and go into document recovery mode in front of an audience watching it broadcast on 4 huge screens.
Anyway, the talk went well, with some great instant feedback via twitter, and I didn’t do my usual trick of over-running.
If you’d like to grab my OSCON HTML 5 presentation (.ODP, 2.7MB), please do. Here’s my OSCON HTML 5 presentation video (FLV, 45 mins).
I confess that I was nervous, too, about presenting to a lot of very active Open Source coders as the rep of a closed-source company, on a Windows machine. (In my defence, it’s a dual-boot Ubuntu/ Windows machine and I needed to demo Internet Explorer).
I’m delighted to say that I had nothing but friendship and courtesy from all attendees, who applauded the fact that Opera evangelises, develops and follows Open Web Standards. I’d like to thank all those who made me feel so welcome; it was an honour to meet you.
I wrote a piece for ZDNet that you might like, about learning through View Source and Open Web Standards called How openness unlocks the web’s power. (They edited out my final line: “Proprietary formats and closed standards are the enemy of the open web” for some unknown reason.)
Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the DOCTYPE.
I was honoured to be invited by the Multipack, a group of Birmingham-based web professionals, to the first Multipack Presents, to talk about HTML 5 as part of an afternoon of discussion of emerging standards.
Rather than another “what is HTML 5?” talk, I decided to give a talk which I wish I’d been able to hear before I began my HTML 5 redesign. I talked through the process of the redesign, the decisions I made, the blind alleys I went up and where I got confused because the spec is ambiguous or opaque.
You can grab the The HTML 5 experiments (PDF, 2.5M) for your viewing pleasure, and play with the HTML 5 forms demo (currently only Opera 9.5 and upwards supports these new features). I’m not sure how much sense the presentation makes in isolation, though.
(Here’s a great serendipitous photo of me and my opening slide)
Also speaking were a very old mate, Matt Machell, who did an excellent introduction to WAI-ARIA, and my fellow beer-monster Stuart Langridge on New Whizzy JavaScript stuff.
I’d like to thank and congratulate the Multipack for organising a free Birmingham event to start building a Midlands-community that will show those Southern ponces in Brighton that you don’t need a few pebbles on a beach to have a vibrant scene. Thanks also to Birmingham web design agency One Black Bear who opened up their beautiful offices to a group of strangers and found it much fuller than anyone anticipated. Cheers to Campaign Monitor for pizza.
As is usual when a group of geeks meet up, there was beer and lewdness but also idea-swapping and inspirations.
So Langridge has written a test page verifying JavaScript can access the new HTML 5 elements for manipulation, as I didn’t know how to. Spurred on by Matt’s WAI-ARIA introduction, Langridge has come up with a proof-of-concept ARIA stylesheet and is looking for comments.
One of my aims was to get people involved in trying HTML 5 spec and participating in its specification, as I believe if you don’t vote you have no right to complain about the government you get. A few attendees have told me that they’re going to do just that, so mission accomplished for me. For example, Andy Mabbett has been thinking about HTML 5 and microformats and has mailed the HTML 5 working group.
Next meetup is in March, but I’ll be in India. Assuming I’m back I hope to see every Midlands-based web professional at the April meetup.
I’m delighted that my old mate Molly Holzschlag is joining the Web Evangelist team at Opera.
I’ve known Molly since 2001. She was a journalist covering a Wrox XML conference I was helping run in Las Vegas. A colleague of mine, Karli Watson had a quickie, tacky Vegas wedding and Molly and I attended.
Two years later, I was searching for someone to co-author a book with me about usability, and found Molly. We were both unaware that we’d met before until halfway through our collaboration. Usability: the site speaks for itself sold poorly (and taught me some vital lessons about web developers and how they differ from programmers) but it cemented my friendship with Molly. She’s been to my house, eaten my evil chicken, charmed my children (“a real American!”) and helped me drink a bottle of vodka.
It’s great to work with old friends like Molly, Millsy and Jon Hicks, and new friends like “Zip Pin” Zi Bin, Shwetank, David-not-Dave, Andreas “Frisky” Bovens and Henny “Henry” Swan. One of the comments on Molly’s blog is “That’s some team Opera are building.” Fuck, yeah. And I’m delighted to be a part of it.
A long interview with me about One Web and the importance of web standards for device-independent development, which will presumably get Luca all foamy at the mouth again. Originally published in .net magazine a month ago.
I’ll be presenting “Confessions of a mad scientist: my HTML 5 experiments” on Saturday at 4pm in Birimingham (meet at 2pm for beers).
Also on the bill is Stuart Langridge on JavaScript and another old friend, Matt Machell, discussing ARIA. It’s free, so see you there? (More details)