Our latest events include State of Play, the business and technology of HTML5 games, in Sydney May 28, and Code, Australia's HTML5 and JavaScript developer conference.
webStorage: Persistent client side data storage
Until recently, the only ways to maintain a user’s data between visits to your site have been to store it on the server, or use cookies in the browser. Both present significant security challenges and quite a good deal of effort for us as developers.
Cookies are designed for communication between … Read more »
Web Directions South 2012 — got an idea for a session?
It’s that time of the year again when John and I start writing ideas and names on post it notes, shuffling them around, and coming up with the program that will be Web Directions South, this October 18 and 19. The only thing that scares us is that 2011 was … Read more »
localStorage, perhaps not so harmful
Recently, Christian Heilmann and Taras Glek, both at Mozilla, posted articles critical of localStorage. The arguments in each of these really didn’t gel with my experience, and both felt unduly alarmist (“considered harmful” as argued elsewhere really should be retired as a post heading). So, I wanted to … Read more »
In honour of International Women’s Day
The 8th of March is International Women’s Day. In honour of the occasion I decided to create a listing of all the presentations by people who happen to be women that we’ve had at Web Directions conferences over the years.
Many hours later I had come up with the list below.
I … Read more »
Introducing Web Directions Code, Melbourne in May
If you just read our blog here, you might think it’s been a little quiet since Web Dirctions South last year. But we have in fact just finished a 4 city roadshow with workshops by Andy Clarke and me (John Allsopp) as well as our second round of … Read more »
Standards, innovation, Flash, ownership and all that
It’s often argued (well, asserted might be a better way of putting it) that standards are an anathema to innovation, or at the very least a significant impediment to it.
At its most extreme, this is used as an argument for disbanding the W3C, and even for core web technologies … Read more »
The Next 6 Billion
Some time this month, for the first time, there will be 7 Billion people alive on earth. In around 14 years, the United Nations predicts our population will reach 8 Billion. These are numbers the human mind has not evolved to intuitively understand.
According to most estimates just over 2 … Read more »
Web Directions South 2011
When you work on something for an extended period of time but which itself lasts itself only a brief moment, such as Maxine and I do with Web Directions, there’s an intensity to the event itself, and the strange mixture of relief (and exhaustion) coupled with nostalgia when it … Read more »
The challenge of WYSIWYG development for the web
This is the first in what I hope will be a number of articles I’m writing to clarify my thinking in the lead up to my Dao of Web Design Revisited presentation at this years Web Directions South.
In the middle 1990s, by an accident of fate and coincidence … Read more »
The web is a different problem
One of the most persistent criticisms of web technologies is that they evolve slowly, indeed, too slowly. Often the argument is raised that the process of standards is antithetical to “innovation” (for innovation read “making cool stuff up”).
To contrast with this glacial change, we’re typically pointed toward the wonders of … Read more »
2D Transforms in CSS3
One of the most powerful features of CSS3 are transforms, which allow us to take any element in an HTML document, and while not changing its effect on the page layout, rotate it, translate it (move it left, right, up and down), skew it and scale it. CSS3 provides … Read more »
What do you know? Video now available
What do you know? That’s the question we posed 20 Australian designers, developers, UX folks and others for our first ever “What do you know” events in Sydney and Melbroune.
The format was simple — each of the speakers had 5 minutes to tell the audience something they know — … Read more »
On the (abominable) proposed HTML5 “scoped” attribute for style elements
Over the last couple of years, I’ve had my fair share to say about the direction HTML5 has been taking, in particular being quite critical of the entire approach taken to adding richer semantics to HTML, as well as specific language choices.
It must be said though, that nothing has … Read more »
Bring back the CSS bike shedding property!
There’s not necessarily a lot of whimsy in the world of web standards. A great deal of value, a lot of hard work by really smart people, but not whimsy.
Well, recently there’s been a little bit of whimsy in the otherwise dry, but very useful CSS3 Text module, with the … Read more »
HTML5 selectors API — It’s like a Swiss Army Knife for the DOM
In the infancy of JavaScript, there was little if any concept of an HTML document object model (DOM). Even though JavaScript was invented to enable web developers to manipulate parts of a web page, and in the original implementation, in Netscape 2.0, developers could only access the form elements, links, … Read more »
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What do you know?
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State of Web Development Reports
Flip through our detailed reports focussing on the technologies and techniques used by web professionals around the world.
- State of Mobile Web Development (2011)
- State of Web Development (2010)
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Slides and podcasts from previous events
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