By now, professional web designers and developers have got a fairly good grip of “HTML5”. Yes, we know most of what is referred to as HTML5 is not strictly HTML5 at all, indeed a good deal is not even HTML, rather CSS and the DOM. But we know what it is, what we can do […]
For nearly a decade, we’ve been working here at Web Directions to help build a world-class, web focussed industry and profession here in Australia. From humble beginnings, bringing together 200 web developers, we’ve grown to one of the world’s biggest and most respected web design, development and ideas focussed events. While we’ve got a long […]
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 the browser and a […]
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 run the ruler over the arguments, and […]
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 What do you know, this time visiting […]
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 to become “a single source […]
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 billion currently use the internet […]
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 has come and gone. Luckily, through […]
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 far too tedious to go into […]
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 platforms like iOS and […]
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 both 2D and 3D transforms, but […]
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 – think of it as super-concentrated […]
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 quite riled me like the […]
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 “bikeshedding” property. But sadly, […]
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. […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
