One of the side effects of running several focussed conferences into various aspects of front end development as we do with our series of online conferences is you really do get a good understanding of what’s happening with the Web platform–the technologies themselves, in browsers, developers’ perspectives, and more broadly still the place of the […]

If there’s one area of front end engineering where efforts today can pay almost immediate dividends, it’s improving performance.

Type-setting in CSS: Using typography to enhance your design

CSS might not have been what brought me to the Web, but it’s very much what made me first deeply engage with the technology of the Web. Before its arrival I’d built quite a few web sites, and was teaching a course that involved building web sites at TAFE (post secondary education in Australia that’s […]

When I first started developing for the web, networks were glacially slow by today’s standards. In the early to mid 1990s a dialup modem speed of 14400bps (bits per second) was common, a 56K (kilo bits per second) a very fast connections. That’s bits, so divide by 8 to get bytes per second–we’re talking 1800-7,000 […]

I hear from my children there’s these things called “streaks” on social media (actually Ms just about 13 called out to Ms just turned 11 the other day “streaks aren’t a thing any more”), a game based dynamic for increasing the stickiness of social media (it’s also a useful technique for positive habit forming) so […]

I love CSS. I’ve developed with, developed tools for, written articles, tutorials and even whole books about, delivered workshops and presentations on CSS since almost its very beginning.But it’s always been a bit of the odd one out when it comes to web technologies. CSS arrived just as techniques for developing relatively sophisticated designs using […]

To say the Web’s origins were humble would be an understatement. Considered by hypertext experts at its beginning to be markedly inferior to the then state of the art, its ambitions were in many ways limited. A way to view documents, and link them together, it supported a small number of elements for structuring these […]

Progressive Web Apps–Web sites that can progressively turn into app like experiences and be installed on your devices–were introduced to the world at this very conference in 2015, by Alex Russell.

PWAs now also work on desktop systems, but usually desktop applications have different requirements as they are usually used for creating, in contract to consumption on mobile. As a user you want to be able to access your files, copy paste without issues, not having the screen turn off while giving a presentation, you want access to printers and other devices, access to local fonts. The list goes on! Currently most of those things are only available to native apps and are not things you want your random web sites to have access to. Project Fugu is the project to extend the web with more native like capabilities in a way that is safe and understood by the users. Join this talk to learn more about the exciting things we are working on as part of Project Fugu.

When I was younger the opening lines of the Beatle’s seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band resonated with a sense of genuine antiquity, which no doubt the band intended–20 years seemed an aeon in the eyes of someone young. Especially the years 1947, from the early post war days of genuine privation for people […]

As you can imagine for folks in the business of producing conferences the last few weeks have resulted in a great deal of thinking…. and rethinking of our plans for our upcoming events, particularly Code and Code Leaders in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the meme goes–”life comes at you fast”.  Just 7 days ago we wrote to […]

Web Directions has always had a strong focus on design; and yet it was only with the launch of our product design conference, Design last year, that we had a dedicated, stand alone event for all things digital product and service design. The response to last year’s Design  was overwhelmingly positive,  we’ve worked even harder on […]

If you’ve been in the industry any length of time, you’ll know how essential it is to keep your knowledge up to date, and how much work that can be. One of our key goals with our events is to help attendees do just that, and as always this year’s Summit features keynotes, design and […]

From the very beginning, our events have had a strong focus on development. With our background in developing (both for the Web and of tools for other web developers) it’s something we’ve always thought a lot about, and continue to focus on. As the event matured, and as the roles of development and design separated […]

We’re in full swing gearing up for our annual Summit, our big two track conference, taking place November 1 and 2 in Sydney. This year we’re excited to be returning to our home for many years, the Convention Centre in Darling Harbour, Sydney. Bringing as good a lineup as we’ve ever had. The full program […]