The Multipack Presents… Emerging Standards

A very insightful, forward thinking set of talks in a great location, with informal and interactive atmosphere.
Or “A great day geeking out”.

This was the first of a more formal series of events put on by the Multipack community of web professionals in Birmingham, and my first time attending, having only recently discovered them via the medium of Twitter.

The subject of “Emerging Standards” is inevitably going to have a forward looking bias, and that’s what we got.  All of the talks had a common theme around how existing open standard web technologies are having to evolve to provide the tools required to keep pace with the development of rich internet apps.

WAI ARIA

Matt Machell’s talk on WAI ARIA was an eye opener to a subject I’d had little exposure to.  It served as a good introduction as to ‘what’ it was all about, with a little bit of ‘how’… though the ‘why’ seems to have been somewhat devalued by the advent of HTML 5.

Aside from the obvious benefits, and apparent overlap with the new HTML 5 spec - it left me wondering how the roles could be mapped to existing UX pattern libraries.  The list of suggested labels for certain UI elements (sliders, tree view, date picker etc) reminded me of the UX patterns I’d seen in Infragistics’ Quince.

The case was made, that even if much of what ARIA offers is superseded by HTML 5 – it still provides the ability to include that extra descriptive information within HTML 4.  As such, it is more currently relevant, and will continue to be so for existing web apps which are unlikely to upgrade their doctype in the foreseeable future.

HTML 5

Bruce Lawson spoke about the new HTML 5 spec from a practical point of view; sharing his experiences of experiments with the standard.  Seems to me that its a move to more descriptive markup; more casual.  There’s also greater consideration for contextual content hierarchy.  It appears more practical to use, an evolution of HTML from its beginnings to a point today where we have better appreciation of how it is actually used.  Especially with consideration for the new breed of web apps, which require

He described the working group’s approach to defining the new spec, as ‘”Paving over the cow paths”.  Meaning that they paid particular attention to changes validating the current usage of elements that were already broadly supported by browsers.  For example; containing several block level elements within <a>tags.  Strictly speaking, this does not validate currently (although browsers support it), but with HTML 5 it will be be perfectly legal.

However, it is likely to be 2-3 years before we see full browser support (meaning you can justifiably develop for it, based on client compatibility).  So in the meantime, Flash and particularly Silverlight will continue to gain ground in the rich application space until HTML 5 and future improvements and usages of JavaScript can breach the gap.

JavaScript

Which brings us neatly to the subject of the third and final talk of the day, by Stuart Langridge on “… ” well, I’m not sure we actually got a title.  But having established it wasn’t about the optimistically named ECMAScript Harmony, which could take forever to approach anything like a practical reality – Stuart took us on a tour of some of the lesser known methods available for those working with JavaScript now and in the foreseeable future.

For the first time in the day – Microsoft got a bit of grudging recognition for having implemented some really quite nifty features a number of years back.  However, being Microsoft, and with no browser other than IE supporting them at the time – rather than being incorporated or proposed as standards, they were disregarded.

Subplots

• “If it wasn’t for IE…”

  A common phrase heard throughout the day when discussing existing technologies and standards that could be used today… yes, all together now “If…

• Corporate rivalries and politics have too much say in the definition of web standards.

  The significant contributors towards HTML 5 working group are representatives from the main browser manufacturers.  The obstacles to ubiquity of standards across browsers are.. the browser manufacturers.  In Apple, Google and Microsoft we have two huge companies, all of which produce their own browsers, have interests in promoting their own applications and technologies, and also supply the operating systems on which we use all this stuff.

  On the other hand – we need the browser manufacturers to be actively involved in the ratification of standards if they are to be worth the Mac/PC they’re written on. Plus competition drives innovation; would we be seeing the encouraging progress in the spec of HTML 5 if it wasn’t for the emergence on Silverlight and Flash?

• It’s all about “Progressive Enhancement”

  Which seems like a more positive phrase than “Graceful Degradation” for effectively describing the same thing; taking advantage of improved and extended tools and standards, without discounting older browsers.

All in all, a great event.  Thanks to One Black Bear for the use of their very cool studios, Campaign Monitor for the Pizza, the Speakers for their time and knowledge, and the guys who have kept multipack going long enough for more of us to find out about it.  It’s great to have something like this in Birmingham and I’m already looking forward to the next Multipack Presents, though I’ll be taking off on a jet plane for Vegas when the next meetup is on in March.

I’ll update this article with links to the presentations when they come online (as they will give a far better view of the topics than i have done here!)  In the meantime, have a look at some photos from the event.

Update

Matt, Bruce and Stuart have all posted about the event and kindly uploaded their slides for public consumption:

• Matt Machell: WAI ARIA - An Intro
• Bruce Lawson: The HTML 5 Experiments
• Stuart Langridge: Whizzy JavaScript Stuff

After a couple of days reflection on the event, I’m even more enthused; The subjects of the talks, and the atmosphere and enthusiasm of everyone involved all had a very positive vibe - good news for Birmingham, and the interweb in general.