Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Ghost in the Shadow DOM – Video presentation from Ryan Seddon

The DOM will finally have real encapsulation with the introduction of the Shadow DOM, a subset of the Web Components spec that will revolutionise web development as we know it. In this session we’ll take a short, sharp tour on the how and why of what the Shadow DOM has to offer. Like what you […]

Getting all touchy feely with the mobile web – Andrew Fisher

Photo of Andrew FisherAs the majority of web users shift to touch devices, the expectation is becoming that everything becomes touchable — including the mobile web. This session will provide a practical and pragmatic view of where touch is at from a web standards perspective and how you can start weaving touch interactions into your mobile web applications.

HTML5 technologies and game development – Rob Hawkes

Photo of Rob HawkesWith Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and other block­buster games now working in modern web browsers, it’s fair to say native, browser based gaming has arrived for real. But how do they do it? In this session, Mozilla Technical Evangelist Rob Hawkes looks at the features now in your browsers to help develop games (and other interactive web based experiences) including the Canvas and WebGL, HTML5 Audio API, Mouselock and the Joy­stick API.

Designing in the browser – Divya Manian

Photo of Divya ManianEach website is a product used daily by people to take actions, not just read the content on it. Your product is amorphous, it takes the shape of whatever container it fills: a mobile browser, a touch enabled desktop browser, or a 30″ iMac that is connected to the Internet via tethering. Photoshop is just one of the means to an end in this new age of utilitarian web sites. The new technologies available in HTML5 already allow you to create prototypes quickly in the browser. Learn how to create a prototype from start to finish using these new technologies while taking advantage of quick prototyping tools.

The Web’s Third Decade – Faruk Ateş

Photo of Faruk AteşOur medium has entered its third decade of existence, and is ready for some growing up. Our definitions and understand­ing of the web are rapidly getting out of date, as, too, are our practices for building on it. It is time to re-evaluate where things are and, more importantly, where they are going.

Getting offline: appcache, localStorage for HTML5 apps that work offline – John Allsopp

Photo of John AllsoppOne of the perceived benefits of “native” apps is that they can be installed on a device, then run when the user isn’t connected. But web apps can do this too. In this session, John Allsopp will show you how to use HTML5 features such as appcache and webStorage to create apps that the user can install, and which will work even when the user is cruising at 30,000 feet with no web connection. These features also have the added bonus of helping to improve the performance of web sites and apps, and even work in all modern browsers and devices, including IE8 up!

HTML5, device APIs and PhoneGap – Dave Johnson

Photo of Dave JohnsonWhere once web pages were sand­boxed, with little if any access to the underlying device capabilities, increasingly, this is no longer the case. From the first steps of geolocation, which enables any web site or application to ask the browser for a user’s location, an increasing range of device features are being exposed in the DOM: the file system, camera, gyrosopes, address book, com­passes and more. In this session, Dave Johnson, originator of the phoneGap project delves into HTML5 and related device APIs, enabling us to build richer, more sophisticated applications in the browser.

The HTML5 History API – Anson Parker

Photo of Anson ParkerGet the low-down on this excellent HTML5 feature and learn how you can add it to your own web projects (and why you’d want to!). We’ll also look at some of the missteps made along the way (like the 2011/12 Twitter web interface).

Fantastic forms for mobile web – Tammy Butow

Photo of Tammy ButowLet’s have a look at how new features such as autofocus, required fields, native date pickers, place­holder text and popping up tailored keyboards for numbers and email addresses on mobile devices can make life more enjoyable!

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 just so good, we really […]

Damon Oehlman – HTML5 API Soup

Photo of Damon OehlmanIn this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps.

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, and images in a page. […]

Get off(line)

Taking your web sites and apps offline with the HTML5 appcache There’s a general (and understandable) belief by even many developers that web sites and web applications can only be used when the browser has a web connection. Indeed, this is routinely cited as one of the real advantages of “native” apps over web apps. […]

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Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.

Joel Roberts Web Developer