My first day at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2011 was the Web conferences where in major presentations I attended were all about HTML5, RDFa, Microformats, jQuery and JavaScript. There was a PlayBook related key-note, the sad part of that key-note was that though the speaker had the PlayBook in his hand he didnt bother to show it to the audience. I have briefly listed the topics covered in the sessions I attended.
Tomorrow’s Tech today- HTML5 by Scott Davis
- Excitement and new features in HTML5
- More importance to semantics than tags- Tags mean something.
- W3C thought of paving over the practices in HTML4
- Google using the new <!doctype> element from HTML5. Chrome supporting HTML5.
- Apple- Safari, Mozilla- Firefox also support HTML5
- Oh how can we forget IE- Good news is Microsoft now has introduced HTML5 support in IE9.
- How about Mobile platforms? HTML5 provides common platform for mobile applications.
- The O’Reilly curve- Start learning when O’Reilly publishes a book on a certain technology.
- The paradigm has changed from- developing applications for the slowest browser(slowest animal in the herd) to developing applications to work on the best browser (strongest animal in the herd)
- Dive into HTML5- diveintohtml5.org – Entire book for FREE 🙂 by Mark Pilgrim
New elements
- Simplified doctype – <!DOCTYPE html>
- header, article, nav, section and so on.
- HTML5 enabling script for support in versions before IE 9
- <form/> enhancements- new form elements- tel, search, url, date, email and so on.- <input type=”new_type” />
- Library to look at- Modernizer- Supports the new HTML5 elements
- Application cache to cache the resources for browsing offline.
- Local storage is for data- treats the data as Hashmap- 5MB per domain of storage.
- WEB SQL database- supported across all the webkit browsers. Firefox and IE not going to support this.
- <video/>- No one single format/codec for working across all browser.
- Use different/alternate formats with in the <video> tag so that there’s a fallback for video formats.
Resources
A superb session by Scott- As usual its dynamic, fun filled. Wish to hear more of his sessions. 🙂
Programming in HTML5 by Venkat–
Venkat showed us how different new features of HTML5- new elements, local storage, form enhancements can be used to create web pages. The sessions was complete hands-on like and was a really good introduction to HTML5. And was a good value addition for Scott’s previous talk I had attended.
Post lunch was a show hosted by Edmundo where in he performed some awesome illusions- playing around with a red handkerchief- making it invisible, making it to go into someone’s pant after he blew it and so on. Then there was an illusion where in he changed the color of the 500rupee note to red and It was clearly a 20rupee note which was replaced with a 500 rupee note and so on. But it was really superb performance by Edmundo.
Hidden Webservices: Microformats and Semantic web by Scott Davis
- First thing that comes to mind when Webservices is mentioned- SOAP.
- Web Services as seen now is an combination of Web and Services, but there’s a way to approach Webservices as one single aspect which actually becomes part of the web.
- Two approaches for Webservices- Using RDFa and Microformats. (Scott was really appreciatvie of Wikipedia as source of information, so linking these to wikipedia ;))
- These add metadata to the web pages
- This also helps in SEO as the search engine now gets more information about the page- Semantics of the page.
- <meta> tags are of similar kind.
- Explained different case studies of how these are being used by websites like- youtube, flickr, google, yahoo.
- BestBuy uses RDFa extensively- GoodRelations.
JavaScript- Real language in there by Venkat–
- Basics of JavaScript like no typing, looping constructs, if-else statements.
- Declaring classes, creating objects- A different approach than OO- Using the function keyword.
- Adding methods dynamically to the class.
- Class are actually a collection of properties
- Method reuse supported by Composition.
- Checking the code quality using jslint
- writing unit tests for javascript- seperate the javascript from the html.
Today’s sessions I attended were either Scott or Venkat talking baring the jQuery talk. It feels good to attend Scott’s sessions- he is so lively. Looking forward to the Java conference tomorrow.