Resources

Podcasts, slides and other pre­sen­ta­tion materials

We have dozens of presentations online from previous conferences. Explore the links below to see slideshows and hear podcasts from leading experts in:

Jeremy Keith — Hot Topics

Jeremy Keith PortraitContinuing a pop­u­lar @media tra­di­tion, the final ses­sion for day one, hosted by Jeremy Keith, will fea­ture a hand­ful of speak­ers dis­cussing ques­tions posed by con­fer­ence atten­dees. Wear your flak jacket: there will be controversy!

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Doug Schepers — SVG Today and Tomorrow

Doug Schepers PortraitThought SVG was dead? Think again. Once rel­e­gated to plug-​​in sta­tus, Scalable Vector Graphics is now spread­ing rapidly, in browsers, mobiles, and even tele­vi­sions, with broad native sup­port and graph­i­cal script libraries. It’s used on major web­sites like Wikipedia, Google Docs, and the Washington Post. Whether images or apps, stand­alone or inte­grated into HTML, CSS, or Canvas, SVG is a pow­er­ful tool in a devel­oper or designer toolkit. With full script­ing sup­port, ani­ma­tions, and advanced visual effects, SVG lets you reuse skills you already have. Learn how to use SVG to best effect to add standards-​​based bling to your webapp or site, see what works and what to avoid, and glimpse where the future lies.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Rachel Andrew — Core CSS3

Rachel Andrew PortraitThis ses­sion will be a solid intro­duc­tion to CSS3 by way of prac­ti­cal exam­ples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Tom Hughes-​​Croucher — An introduction to server-​​side JavaScript

Tom Hughes-Croucher PortraitServer-​​side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a num­ber of great projects pro­vid­ing dif­fer­ent pieces of the puz­zle. This talk will intro­duce server-​​side JavaScript and pro­vide an overview of the exist­ing projects as well as some ideas about where it’s all going in the future.

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Mark Boulton — Designing grid systems

Mark Boulton PortraitGrid sys­tems have been used in print design, archi­tec­ture and inte­rior design for gen­er­a­tions. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid sys­tem com­po­si­tion and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to lap­tops. Users can manip­u­late the browser, they can remove con­tent, resize the can­vas, resize the type­faces. A designer is no longer in con­trol of this pre­sen­ta­tion. So where do grid sys­tems fit in to all that?

See the slides and hear the podcast »

John Resig — Testing mobile JavaScript

John Resig PortraitThis talk will be a com­pre­hen­sive look at what you need to know to prop­erly test your web appli­ca­tions on mobile devices. We’ll look at the dif­fer­ent mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to sup­port them. Additionally we’ll exam­ine some of the test­ing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Simon Willison — Building crowdsourcing applications

Simon Willison PortraitCrowdsourcing appli­ca­tions take indi­gestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter peri­ods of time.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Christian Crumlish — Designing for play

Christian Crumlish PortraitTaking ideas from game design, musi­cal instru­ment design, and play-​​acting tech­niques includ­ing improv and bodys­torm­ing, Christian will address the role of play in dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences and how we can design to fos­ter and encour­age play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

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Patrick Lauke — Brave New World of HTML5

Patrick Lauke PortraitHTML5 was orig­i­nally called Web Applications 1.0, but that doesn’t mean it’s only for scripters – there’s plenty for markup mon­keys as well as JavaScript junkies.

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Sandi Wassmer — Inclusive design is for everyone

Sandi Wassmer PortraitInclusive Design is cur­rently the domain of peo­ple who design phys­i­cal things, like prod­uct design­ers and archi­tects, but Sandi Wassmer is firm in her belief that Inclusive Design applied in the online envi­ron­ment just makes sense.

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Remy Sharp — Browsers with wings: HTML5 APIs

Remy Sharp PortraitHTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new lan­guage, there’s plenty for web app devel­op­ers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and sep­a­rated out as their own W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tions. This ses­sion will take you through demos and code and show off some of the out­right crazy bleed­ing edge demos that are being pro­duced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it’s not all pie in the sky – plenty is use­ful today, some even in Internet Explorer!

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Hannah Donovan — Telling stories through design

Hannah Donovan PortraitHannah Donovan will talk about the designer as a sto­ry­teller — espe­cially in terms of the impor­tance of this role within a team. Improve your out­put as a designer by tak­ing a closer look at influ­enc­ing the input. As a visual nar­ra­tor we help to visu­alise, inspire and curate for the peo­ple we work with as well as con­nect­ing sce­nar­ios around the larger prod­uct saga that sup­ports the inter­faces we design. By exam­in­ing your input, make your out­put more effec­tive with your team and users alike, paving paths for peo­ple to tell their own sto­ries as your prod­uct evolves over time.

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Steve Souders — Even faster web sites

Steve Souders PortraitWeb 2.0 is adding more and more con­tent to our pages, espe­cially fea­tures that are imple­mented in Ajax. But our web appli­ca­tions are evolv­ing faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web appli­ca­tions faster. In this ses­sion, Steve Souders dis­cusses web per­for­mance best prac­tices from his sec­ond book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-​​saving tech­niques are used by the world’s most pop­u­lar web sites to cre­ate a faster user expe­ri­ence, increase rev­enue, and reduce oper­at­ing costs. Steve pro­vides tech­ni­cal details about reduc­ing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for mak­ing your page load faster in emerg­ing mar­kets where net­work con­nec­tiv­ity is a challenge.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Relly Annett-​​Baker — All the small things

Relly Annett-Baker PortraitMicrocopy is the ninja of online con­tent. Fast, furi­ous and deadly, it has the power to make or break your online busi­ness, to kill or stay your foes. It’s a sen­tence, a con­fir­ma­tion, a few words. One word, even. It isn’t big or flashy. It doesn’t leave a call­ing card. If it does its job your cus­tomer may never notice it was there.

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Dan Hill — Closing keynote: 15 years in

Dan Hill PortraitIt is time for the prac­tice of web devel­op­ment and design to broaden its hori­zons. How can the skills and expe­ri­ence we’ve acquired over the last 15 years of work­ing on the inter­net be applied more broadly to, say, the design of cities, build­ings, organ­i­sa­tions, gov­ern­ment and so on?

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Kelly Goto — Keynote: WorkFLOW

Kelly Goto PortraitShift your think­ing, alter your process, and cre­ate a dynamic of doing rather than spin­ning. Workflow vet­eran Kelly Goto leads you through a fast-​​paced ses­sion designed to help tran­scend obsta­cles and develop a cul­ture of adap­ta­tion, progress and flow. Learn the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples behind The FLOW Method, an action­able series of steps uti­liz­ing new processes and tech­niques to re-​​invigorate your orga­ni­za­tion and team. Whether you are an inde­pen­dent, small busi­ness owner or the man­ager of an in-​​house web mar­ket­ing team, you will gain valu­able insights and tools to bring back to your organization.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Cameron Adams — Keynote: Making Waves

Cameron Adams PortraitIf you work on the web, it was hard to miss the announce­ment of Google Wave in May. It was espe­cially excit­ing because this project, designed to leapfrog cur­rent modes of online com­mu­ni­ca­tion, was devel­oped right here in Australia by a Sydney based team. Wave’s inter­face designer — Web Directions favourite, Cameron Adams — will give us some unique insights into the chal­lenges of bring­ing such an inno­v­a­tive prod­uct to fruition, the prob­lems you face in design­ing a desk­top appli­ca­tion in the browser, and how to nur­ture a startup cul­ture inside a large com­pany. Cameron has given some truly mem­o­rable pre­sen­ta­tions at pre­vi­ous Web Directions — this keynote draw­ing from his expe­ri­ences as part of the Google Wave team will be no exception.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Matt Webb — Opening keynote: Escalante

Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 9.10am.

Matt Webb PortraitThe long run to the turn of the mil­len­nium got us pre­oc­cu­pied with con­clu­sions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubi­comp, but the begin­ning of a cen­tury of smart mat­ter. It’s not about fix­ing the Web, but mak­ing a spring­board for new economies, new ways of cre­at­ing, and new cultures.

The 21st cen­tury is a par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture, not a con­sumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be respon­si­ble for world-​​size effects, on the same play­ing field as major cor­po­ra­tions and gov­ern­ment? We can look at the Web — break­ing down pub­lish­ing and con­sum­ing from day zero — for where we might be head­ing in a world big­ger than we can really see, and we can look at design — play­ful and ratio­nal all at once — to help us fig­ure out what to do when we get there.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Rob Mitchell & Mike Williams — Test your JavaScript

Rob Mitchell PortraitMike Williams PortraitMike Williams and Rob Mitchell will explain why you should test your JavaScript code, what to test, and how to go about it. They’ll talk about full-​​stack browser-​​based tests, as well as true unit tests, and explain where each are appro­pri­ate. They’ll also dis­cuss inte­gra­tion of your tests into an auto­mated build, and you’ll leave with a burn­ing desire to try it out on your own projects.

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Donna Spencer — Information seeking behaviours

Donna Spencer PortraitEach infor­ma­tion seek­ing behav­iour needs very dif­fer­ent approaches to infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, infor­ma­tion design and page lay­out. During this pre­sen­ta­tion, Donna will talk about each infor­ma­tion behav­iour, its key attrib­utes, key design needs, and show good and bad exam­ples of each.

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Christian Crumlish — Designing social interfaces

Christian Crumlish PortraitDesigning for social inter­ac­tion is hard. People are unpre­dictable, con­sis­tency is a mixed bless­ing, and co-​​creation with your users requires a dizzy­ing flir­ta­tion with loss of con­trol. Christian will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sam­pling of inter­ac­tion pat­terns, design prin­ci­ples and best prac­tices to help you improve the design of your dig­i­tal social environments.

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Andrew Fisher — Cloud computing

Andrew Fisher PortraitCloud ser­vices change the way a busi­ness or cam­paign can oper­ate, increas­ing flex­i­bil­ity, tak­ing less time to deploy and intro­duc­ing superb cost effi­cien­cies so that we can redi­rect finances to where they’ll really pay for us — in inno­va­tion, exper­i­men­ta­tion and plan­ning ahead. With these oppor­tu­ni­ties, how­ever, come chal­lenges around data and plat­form secu­rity, change man­age­ment and who “owns” the plat­form and data you are using.

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Suze Ingram — Would you like service design with that?

Suze Ingram PortraitService design is well estab­lished in Europe and North America and there’s already a hand­ful of Australian busi­nesses offer­ing ser­vice design. What is it? Does expe­ri­ence in design­ing for screen inter­ac­tion trans­late to design­ing ser­vices too? Will ser­vice design be the next big thing? Suze offers insight by draw­ing on her years of expe­ri­ence as a UX designer and researcher. She shows how ser­vice design might fit into your busi­ness in the future, who you might pitch it to, and what sort of skills you might need to deliver ser­vice design.

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Mark Stanton — Best practices for speeding up your site

Mark Stanton PortraitAs we pack our pages with AJAX and RIA good­ness we often lose sight of the fact that the key to excep­tional user expe­ri­ence is the respon­sive­ness of your site. Inspired by the excel­lent work by Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team, this talk will have some­thing that every site can ben­e­fit from. You will learn how to analyse what your end users are expe­ri­enc­ing and how to reduce your load times by 25 – 50% using a range of sim­ple techniques.

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Luke Stevens — Data driven design

Luke Stevens PortraitFar from being the enemy, data can be a designer’s best friend. So much so that it just might be the back­bone of the next evo­lu­tion of web design. Data doesn’t mean less cre­ativ­ity and exper­i­men­ta­tion, it means more. We’ve learned how to design sites that look good, and we know how to mark up our pages with web stan­dards. Now it’s time to fig­ure out what per­forms best.

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Dmitry Baranovskiy — Canvas

Dmitry Baranovskiy PortraitIn this ses­sion, JavaScript ninja Dmitry Baranovskiy takes us into the heart and soul of Canvas, look­ing at what it does well, and not so well, how well it is sup­ported, and how to use it in cross browser com­pat­i­ble ways. Developers with a good grasp of JavaScript will be able to add another dimen­sion to their web solu­tions based on what they learn in this session.

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Cheryl Gledhill & Scott Gledhill — Beyond SEO

Cheryl Gledhill PortraitScott Gledhill PortraitSearch engine opti­mi­sa­tion (SEO) is a unique mix of mar­ket­ing, usabil­ity and tech­nol­ogy which can often cause con­fu­sion on how it is imple­mented across dif­fer­ent organ­i­sa­tions. An impor­tant part of your SEO strat­egy is get­ting the most out of your SEO dol­lars. This ses­sion will explain what your devel­op­ers, design­ers, pro­duc­ers, con­tent authors and mar­keters should all know about SEO to ensure you’re get­ting the max­i­mum return on your SEO.

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Grant Robinson — Visualising the user experience

Grant Robinson PortraitRapid pro­to­typ­ing. Widely acclaimed as one of the best ways to cre­ate great user expe­ri­ences, it isn’t with­out its own pit­falls. This ses­sion will dis­cuss the pros and cons of dif­fer­ent pro­to­typ­ing tech­niques, and intro­duce a new tech­nique called “screen­flows” that focuses on visu­al­is­ing the user expe­ri­ence. Discover how to com­bine the best of paper pro­to­typ­ing, wire­frames and HTML pro­to­typ­ing into one sim­ple and effec­tive pro­to­typ­ing tech­nique. Learn how using this method can dra­mat­i­cally decrease the need for doc­u­men­ta­tion, while increas­ing the speed and agility of the devel­op­ment process.

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Jeremy Yuille — The social life of visualization

Jeremy Yuille PortraitWhen visu­al­iza­tion is cou­pled with col­lec­tive intel­li­gence it becomes a very pow­er­ful tool for mak­ing sense of the data that is now an increas­ing part of our per­sonal and orga­ni­za­tional expe­ri­ence. But how do you design social web appli­ca­tions so they can use visu­al­iza­tion effectively?

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Damien McCormack — Accessibility means business

Damien McCormack PortraitOver 4 mil­lion peo­ple in Australia have a dis­abil­ity. As a result they may use the web in a dif­fer­ent way to you: a key­board instead of a mouse; a screen reader instead of a screen. Accessibility is the way that you can tap into this large and grow­ing audience.

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Deborah Schultz — It’s the people, stupid

Deborah Schultz PortraitThe most inter­est­ing prob­lems on the web are social, not tech­ni­cal. Once the open, social stack moves into wide use, the real work is going to be on us to cre­ate ongo­ing expe­ri­ences that inspire, inform, evolve. Avoid this talk if you want to hear about mon­e­tiz­ing com­mu­nity, gam­ing the newest social site for a quick spike in your user num­bers, or how to get a [insert cut­ting edge social plat­form] strat­egy for your brand.

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Fergus Pitt & David Peterson — The mashed up playlist

Fergus Pitt PortraitDavid Peterson PortraitThe ABC launched three new socially net­worked dig­i­tal radio web­sites: ABC Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country in July 2009. They are the first of sev­eral ABC projects involv­ing con­tent aggre­ga­tion. As well as hav­ing slick, highly usable designs the music plat­form inte­grates with var­i­ous sources includ­ing MusicBrainz, YouTube, Last​.fm and Wikipedia. This aggre­ga­tion func­tion­al­ity graph­i­cally illus­trates the pos­si­bil­i­ties of Semantic Web tech­nol­ogy for an edi­to­r­ial organ­i­sa­tion such as the ABC.

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Elliot Jay Stocks — Progressive enhancement

Elliot Jay Stocks PortraitIn the sum­mer of ‘07 in a flood-​​soaked Oxford, England, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His pre­sen­ta­tion, ‘Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation’, looked at how to reward mod­ern browsers with the lat­est CSS tricks and pun­ish IE by drop­ping cer­tain site fea­tures. Over two years later, what has changed? We’re start­ing to see the ide­ol­ogy of pro­gres­sive enhance­ment — espe­cially with CSS3 — spread through­out the web design com­mu­nity, but more work needs to be done.

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Tania Lang — Using AJAX to enhance UX

Tania Lang PortraitAJAX is chang­ing the way that users inter­act with web­sites — it has the poten­tial to pro­vide richer and more inter­ac­tive online user expe­ri­ences but also intro­duces its own set of usabil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity prob­lems. This ses­sion will present views from lead­ing usabil­ity experts from around the world from an expe­ri­enced prac­ti­tioner work­shop con­ducted at the Usability Professionals Conference in USA.

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Lachlan Hardy — The open web

Lachlan Hardy PortraitThe Open Web is an evolv­ing term that encom­passes tech­nolo­gies from web stan­dards stal­warts like HTML, to almost-​​mainstream buzz­words such as OpenID, and on to emerg­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions like PortableContacts, but it’s more than that. It is a philosophy.

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Silvia Pfeiffer — Taking HTML5 <video> a step further

Silvia Pfeiffer PortraitThis talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C to improve the new HTML 5 media ele­ments with mech­a­nisms to allow peo­ple to access mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, includ­ing audio and video. Such devel­op­ments are also use­ful beyond acces­si­bil­ity needs and will lead to a gen­eral improve­ment of the usabil­ity of media, mak­ing media dis­cov­er­able and gen­er­ally a prime cit­i­zen on the Web.

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Doug Schepers — W3C and web standards big picture

Doug Schepers PortraitDoug will talk about the tech­nolo­gies cur­rently under devel­op­ment at W3C which we are likely to see in browsers now or in the near future, and will have demos of as many of them as pos­si­ble. Some of these demos will be HTML5 demos, but also tech­nolo­gies from the WebApps WG, Device API and Policies WG, CSS, SVG, geolo­ca­tion, etc. He will clear the air about HTML vs. XHTML, and why they are not as far apart as peo­ple think.

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Pete Ottery — Designing for suits

Pete Ottery PortraitDesigning web­sites in amongst the “suits” and their busi­ness mod­els, tar­gets, pro­jec­tions and syn­er­gies (ha!) can be death by dot point. Or fun. What are man­ager types actu­ally think­ing when they brief (or don’t) you. How do you trans­late their KPI’s into inter­face designs that

  • 1. get their point across & achieve their targets
  • 2. con­tribute to a prof­itable business
  • 3. are easy to use (who would have thought the users get a say! ;-)
  • See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Kerry Taylor — Semantics & sensors

    Kerry Taylor PortraitThe Semantic Sensor Networks W3C Incubator is an inter­na­tional ini­tia­tive to develop stan­dards for shar­ing infor­ma­tion col­lected by sen­sors and sen­sor net­works over the Web, includ­ing an ontol­ogy for dif­fer­ent types of sens­ing devices and their obser­va­tions, and new approaches for the seman­tic markup of sen­sor descrip­tions and ser­vices that sup­port sen­sor data exchange and sen­sor net­work management.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Renato Iannella — Opening up social networks

    Renato Iannella PortraitSocial Networks have been a world-​​wide phe­nom­e­non and their pro­lif­er­a­tion poses a press­ing inter­op­er­abil­ity and usabil­ity chal­lenge to both web users and ser­vice providers. Web users have dif­fer­ent social net­works accounts and utilise them in dif­fer­ent ways depend­ing on the con­text. For exam­ple, more friendly chat on FaceBook, more pro­fes­sional on LinkedIn, and a bit dar­ing inter­ac­tion on Hi5. Maintaining these mul­ti­ple online pro­files is cum­ber­some and time con­sum­ing and locks in the web user to a ser­vice provider. Also, shar­ing infor­ma­tion and user-​​generated con­tent is par­tic­u­larly chal­leng­ing due to the obscure nature of pri­vacy and rights man­age­ment on social net­works and the lack of aware­ness and trans­parency of such policies.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Scott Hollier — Boosting new media accessibility

    Scott Hollier PortraitThis talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C and its mem­bers to pro­mote and improve web stan­dards and in par­tic­u­lar HTML 5 with mech­a­nisms to allow peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties to access mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, includ­ing audio and video.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Rob Mason — Pervasive computing

    Rob Manson PortraitWhat is dri­ving this accel­er­at­ing dif­fu­sion of net­worked tech­nolo­gies? How do you really mea­sure or con­trol how “per­va­sive” some­thing is? Why would you even want to? We’ll intro­duce you to a prac­ti­cal frame­work for analysing and mea­sur­ing your “spa­tial per­cep­tion of an activ­ity” and explore what it lit­er­ally means for an appli­ca­tion to be “per­va­sive”, in both an expe­ri­en­tial and busi­ness sense. At the end of this ses­sion you’ll be able to clearly dia­gram the key change that’s dri­ving this evo­lu­tion and how it will impact your strate­gies for tech­nol­ogy and busi­ness in the future.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Mark Birbeck — Marking up content with RDFa

    Mark Birbeck PortraitRDFa is at the cor­ner­stone of the Browser Web and the Semantic Web. With RDFa, pub­lish­ing data becomes as easy as pub­lish­ing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and lever­age all the URI-​​based data inte­gra­tion fea­tures brought by Semantic Web and Linking Open Data technologies.

    In this intro­duc­tory ses­sion pri­mar­ily directed at those who author web con­tent, Mark will touch a range of RDFa top­ics from its goals and how it came about, to its rela­tion­ship to linked data and how it’s being used in some recent projects for UK Government web-​​sites.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Kevin Yank — CSS frameworks

    Kevin Yank PortraitWith the pro­lif­er­a­tion and wide­spread adop­tion of JavaScript frame­works, smart devel­op­ers have won­dered if a sim­i­lar approach to smooth­ing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frame­works like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many oth­ers were born. In this ses­sion, we will sur­vey the land­scape of CSS frame­works and con­sider how each of them deals with the unique chal­lenge of cre­at­ing gen­er­alised, reusable CSS styles.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    WCAG2 — Gian Wild

    Gian Wild PortraitSo WCAG2 — ver­sion 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as set out by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative — has been released as a Candidate Recommendation. What does that mean for Australia? There are many issues that were addressed in WCAG1 which have been left up to pol­icy mak­ers and devel­op­ers in WCAG2. This ses­sion will high­light these issues and talk about what kind of impact they will have on your devel­op­ment and on your audience.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Ben Galbraith — The state of developer tools

    Ben Galbraith PortraitIn this ses­sion, co-​​founder of Ajaxian​.com, and The Ajax Experience con­fer­ences, and now head of Mozilla Foundation’s new Tools team Ben Galbraith will take us on an expe­di­tion through the devel­oper tools land­scape. Learn what’s out there, and what they can do to make you more pro­duc­tive, your sites and appli­ca­tions bet­ter and faster, and your life as a devel­oper more enjoyable.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Lynne d Johnson — Opening keynote: New media — new business

    Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 9.10am

    Lynne D Johnson PortraitLynne will set the tone of the con­fer­ence this year with insights into the future of media drawn from her wealth of expe­ri­ence in busi­ness, media and online com­mu­ni­ties as Senior Editor at Fast Company.

    See the slides and hear the podcast »

    Mark Pesce — Closing keynote: This, that, and the other thing

    Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 4.05pm.

    Mark Pesce PortraitThis is what it feels like to be hyper­con­nected: a new kind of com­mu­nity – per­va­sive, con­tin­u­ous, yet strangely tense and ten­u­ous, like a bal­loon inflated to the point of burst­ing. The lim­its of the neo­cor­tex meet­ing the ampli­fier of the Human Network. That cre­ates unique oppor­tu­ni­ties: we can come together at a word, self-​​organize around or against a blog post, a live-​​streamed video, an auto­mated reply from a face­less, rent-​​seeking orga­ni­za­tion. Nothing can stop us. We can’t even stop our­selves. But what do we want? And the other thing? You’ll need to be at Web Directions South, for the clos­ing keynote, if you want to find out.

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    David Peterson — Semantic web for distributed social networks

    Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.

    David Peterson PortraitHear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleed­ing edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basi­cally all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a dis­trib­uted social net­work. The focus will be not on evan­ge­lism (I don’t really care about that) but how dis­parate open source plat­forms can talk and work together. This stuff actu­ally works and makes devel­op­ment more fluid. These tech­nolo­gies make local devel­op­ment eas­ier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, clas­sic search is still king. How can you lever­age this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an impor­tant role in the cre­ation of a truly dis­trib­uted infor­ma­tion system.

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    Ruth Ellison — Integrating accessibility into design

    Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.

    Ruth Ellison PortraitWhen devel­op­ing web­sites or web appli­ca­tions, we often fol­low the prin­ci­ples of web stan­dards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other acces­si­bil­ity guide­lines. But is this enough? In this ses­sion, Ruth will look at how we can develop acces­si­ble web prod­ucts by tak­ing a holis­tic approach to web acces­si­bil­ity. She will look at dif­fer­ent ways of incor­po­rat­ing acces­si­bil­ity into the design process to pro­duce acces­si­ble and use­ful user expe­ri­ences. This pre­sen­ta­tion will focus on the user expe­ri­ence design process by draw­ing on exam­ples and learn­ings from Ruth’s work in Government.

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