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John Allsopp – The Dao of Web Design Revisited

Web Directions South 2011, Sydney, October 14th.

Session description

In 2000, when the web was less than half the age it is now, when the concept of web standards was still not much more than an ember carefully nurtured by a small group of practitioners who might fairly have been called fanatics (and less charitably, but just as accurately, lunatics), John Allsopp wrote “A Dao of Web Design”.

Little did he know, and even less can he believe, that more than a decade later, an eon in internet years, it is still widely quoted by some of the web’s most well known and respected practitioners, and considered by some to be a seminal text in web design.

So, ten years later, what does John now think about his thesis, and his suggestions for developers? In a world of highly fragmented user experiences, across all manner of screen sizes and input modes, what now seems hopelessly naïve? What if anything, stands the test of time. And what, if anything, new has John learned as he has continued to develop with web technologies over the last 10 years.

Come and listen as John revisits a Dao of Web Design.

Presentation slides

For my presentation, I used speakEasy, a web based presentation tool I’ve been developing for a few months. It’s still very much in alpha, but does enable me to do some cool stuff. For this presentation, I’ve synched my slides, and speaker notes, to the audio. The audio is embedded using HTML5 <audio>, and the slide transitions are triggered by the audio element’s ontimeupdate event. Try scrubbing through the audio, and the slides should synchronize. If you jump back or forward by a slide, the audio also synchronises to the starting point for that slide.

My plan is to make speakEasy available soon (it’s designed to be semantically compatible with S5, Slidy, and some other common presentation systems. Follow me on Twitter to keep up with news on it. )

About John Allsopp

Photo of John AllsoppJohn is a co-​​founder of the Web Directions conference series, and author of one of the earliest books on Microformats. As a software developer, long standing web development speaker, writer, evangelist and self proclaimed expert, he’s spent the last 15 years working with and developing for the web.

As the head developer of the leading cross platform CSS development tool Style Master, and developer and publisher of renowned training courses and learning resources on CSS and standards based development, and author of the highly regarded “A Dao of Web Design” he has been widely recognized as a leader in these fields.

He’s married, has three beautiful daughters, 3 chickens, a cat and several goannas. All female.

Follow John on Twitter: @johnallsopp

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