Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Tantek Çelik – The Once and Future IndieWeb

Silos like Twitter and Facebook pose huge challenges for the longevity, integrity, and ultimately ownership of the content we create. If you care about these things, you need to checkout the IndieWeb. And if this floats your boat, you need to get along to the Engineering Track at Web Directions 2014.

Alex Feyerke – Offline First

Faster, more robust and more fun (web) apps. And if this floats your boat, you need to get along to the Engineering Track at Web Directions 2014.

Web Components – video presentation from Mark Dalgleish

In a fast and furious fifteen minutes, Mark Dalgleish demystifies Web Components by highlighting how, despite its complex appearance, it’s actually made up of a suite of technologies providing features we’re already familiar with. Once you understand what web components bring to the table, you’ll wonder how we ever lived without them. Make sure you […]

Appcache, not so much a douchebag as a complete pain in the #$%^

A little while back, Jake Archibald wrote infamously (and anthropomorphically) that the HTML5 ApplicationCache is a “douchebag”[1]. Mindful that this is a word freighted with troubling significance, it is the term he used, so I’ll go with it. The Urban Dictionary says the word douchebag generally refers to a male with a certain combination of […]

WebRTC now in Chrome Beta for Android

Following Blackberry 10’s support for WebRTC, Chrome beta or Android now supports webRTC, as do Firefox, Opera and Chrome for desktop (and Firefox for Android though not as yet Firefox OS it would seem). A very significant milestone for what many consider a game changing technology. Want to get started with webRTC, you might be […]

More HTML5 syntax and parser quirks you may not have known

Last week we looked at one of HTML5’s syntax quirks, the fact that you don’t need to quote attribute values (unless the values contain a space or as is less well known one of a number of other characters). This time, some more about some of the subtle side effects of HTML5’s laxer syntax rules. […]

Five reasons why you should quote attribute values in HTML5

With HTML5, you don’t have to quote attribute values. Until you do. One of the benefits often touted for HTML5 over XHTML is what I once heard Paul Irish describe as its “loosey goosey” approach to syntax. No longer the strict taskmaster that XHTML was, we can now do all kinds of cool stuff like […]

The iOS 7 homescreen parallax effect in the browser

A couple of weeks ago we started a series on how you might implement some of the more notable design effects in iOS 7 using purely web technologies. In the meantime, it’s been noted elsewhere that this may be difficult and perhaps impossible to do. I’m here today to tell you otherwise! Well, at the […]

Wii Games with HTML5

For most of the history of what might loosely be termed computer games, dedicated consoles (and handheld gaming devices) ruled the roost. And none loomed larger on the landscape than Nintendo, with combined sales of hundreds of millions of units. The dominance of this handful of device makers (essentially Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft) meant that […]

Towards an extensible web

Remember the X in XML, and XHTML? It of course stands for extensible, the idea that these languages allow for their users to build upon them, rather than waiting for some standards organisation to add new features. With HTML5, extensibility of the markup language pretty much went out the window, despite the criticisms of many […]

HTML, CSS and the Clientside App – Video Presentation from Garann Means

As much as they affect JavaScript, state, event handling, and default browser behaviour also impact HTML and CSS in the choices we make, optimizations we can take advantage of, and the architecture of our applications as a whole. Like what you see? Want a piece of the action next time around? Then get along to […]

Build a motion activated security camera, with WebRTC, canvas and Device Orientation

As a web developer, you’ve probably seen emerging HTML5 technologies and APIs like DeviceOrientation and WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications), and thought “wow they look cool, but they are only for hard core gaming, video conferencing, and other such stuff, not for my every day development”. I’m firmly convinced that taking advantage of these capabilities […]

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Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development

Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney