On the first week of February four of us Mindfliers went to Denver for Web Directions North 2009. It rocked. I laughed, I cried, I bowled, I met tons of interesting people, and I learned a boat load of things.
Janae recently covered the conference with her massive post entitled Mapping the Experience. It even includes a rather charming picture of me. However, there was a ton of fascinating topics that I'd love to cover. The catch is there's simply too much to cover in detail, so I'm going to provide a paragraph of my opinion on these topics, then provide you with a handy link or two to allow you to investigate that topic in depth or get presentation slides from what we saw at the conference. Think of it as condensed milk. There's a lot goodness there if you just add water.
There's still this funny disconnect in people that make websites. We like to call ourselves developers or designers, and then start creating artificial boundaries between those two labels. The conference unconsciously reinforced this stereotyping with a design track and developer track in the sessions. I'm a guy that likes Javascript, CSS, HTML, PHP, ASP.NET, and a number of terms and acronyms, so I don't like the cookie cutters people try to divide one another into. I run Photoshop AND Visual Studio. Nonetheless, I've divided up the info I took away from the conference into a designer-oriented and developer-oriented categories, so that I don't bore those of you that aren't as crazy as I am in trying to learn everything. I suggest reading through it all, but if not at least pick away at the stuff most interesting to you.
For People Who Like to Call Themselves Designers
CSS3 and Progressive Enhancement - Bits of CSS3 have been out in the wild for years, providing shiney new ways to enhance a website for the browsers that support them. In the theoretical future, all browsers will be fully on the CSS3 bandwagon, but in the practical now that's not going to be happening anytime soon. A lot of designers have been fearful to roll out CSS3 properties on their sites as a result, in a misguided belief that a site needs to be identical across browsers. Those of us in the know have been singing a different tune, which was reinforced once again at WDN09: progressive enhancement and intentional degredation. The short version of what this means is that you should make a website that looks functional and great on all browsers, but then provide extra pretty pieces to reward the browsers that can support them, and perhaps provide a slightly different (albeit professional) experience for deprecated browsers (*cough* IE6 *cough*) that encourages them to upgrade. Elliot Jay Stocks, Brit web design wunderkind, went over the topic in detail during his presentation. For those of you that couldn't attend, he's provided his slides online at his website (with the promise of trying to add audio in the future).
The Mobile Web - By all accounts, we're rapidly approaching a point where in the next few years the majority of devices connecting to the web will not be computers, but instead mobile phones and other portable devices. This has been known for some time, but a lot of web people have been slow to provide support on their sites for these devices. The sudden popularity of the modern generation of smartphones (thanks to the iPhone) have been pushing out the awareness of this topic quite a bit (and improving dramatically the capabilites of many of these devices on displaying the web). If you want to stay relevant in the web, you need to start yesterday on thinking about how to provide a quality website experience to a screen smaller than a post-it note on a range of devices with varied capabilities in understanding CSS or even HTML. The mobile web was pretty much discussed in every single session I was in at the conference. Brian Fling held a densely-packed, fast-paced session that covered the topic in a lot of detail while getting a lot of laughs from the audience. It doesn't appear that he's put the presentation online yet, but once he does you can find it online (along with all his other presentations) here.
HTML5 - HTML5 is here. It's already getting supported in all the major browsers with some slight catches for IE (which can be solved with JS as explained by John Resig here). It's not 100% solidified, and there's lots of features that have yet to be implemented, but the basic markup structure is there and ready to be used, and neat bits like the Canvas element are already up and running on several browsers (you get one guess on which one isn't using it yet). I've got some idealogical problems with the seemingly elite inner circle control of the spec (particularly in relation to getting RDFa into HTML5, but that's a rant for later), but the fact is that the web of tomorrow is going to be built using HTML5. There were no sessions devoted directly to it, but everyone was discussing it despite that. I want to make it clear: Go learn HTML5 now. Get ahead of the curve. Start figuring out when the heck it's appropriate to use an <aside> element. And once you figure it out, let me know, ok? Cameron Moll provided a handy series of links about HTML5 a while back. Check it out. Got a better resource for it? Please let me know.
SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics. I've been hearing about them for a while, but hadn't really looked into the topic very much. Now I wish I had. Doug Schepers, SVG guru, spent most of the first couple days of Web Directions North trying to get his presentation together at the last minute before it was his turn on the podium. It rocked my world by showing me the possibilities of what SVG can do. In a nutshell - tons. I can't even get into the topic in great detail. Scaling, rotating, animation? It's crazy. The heartbreaker is that IE doesn't support it yet (of course). I'm hoping they jump on that soon, because SVG helps close the rich media gap between what can be done with JavaScript today and rich media plugins like Flash that I'm hoping to see phased out in the future. I'm still ramping up on the topic, but a couple of starting points to tackle the subject are Doug's SVG-Whiz! and the W3C's SVG Home Page. If you're interested in trying your hand at SVG, Inkscape is an open source editor (disclaimer: I haven't tested it out yet.)
For People Who Like to Call Themselves Developers
The Mobile Web - This topic is important for anyone involved in website development. Designers, developers, salesmen, etc. Go look at what I said under the topic for designers, and start investigating the subject. Failing to start working on mobile-capable web apps today probably means failure for you tomorrow.
HTML5 - Once again, see what I said under the Designer tidbits. HTML5 isn't something you should be using for every single site yet, but it's ramping up, and you should be getting familiar with it now while it's still relatively new.
RDFa - Manu Sporny is the kind of man that (1) makes you question whether you actually count as smart, and (2) clearly cares about things deeply and is convincing at making you care about them. I think he's involved simultaneously in trying to save the world in at least six different ways. He's also one of the main forces behind RDFa, a semantic markup methodology that's meant to be expandable, future-looking, and deeply helpful in providing information that has meaning to both humans AND machines. Although I'm sure our future robotic overlords will have RDFa to thank for their rise to power, I still think we need to start using it. The syntax is too verbose for me to tackle in a single paragraph, but RDFa provides a great framework for expressing relationships and meaning to objects that will be usable by reasoning agnets. The hurdles? 1. It's complicated, and people are more inclined to rely on the easier (and presently useful) Microformats despite the sharp limitations that come with those. 2. It's not seeing a lot of practical use right now, so we need to see people buy into the format and start making practical applications that harness its power to get people to start investing time and money into learning and using it. 3. The people behind HTML5 (especially Ian Hickson) are opposed to including RDFa in the spec, which is going to make the use of RDFa pretty difficult in the future if that's not worked out. RDFa is an interesting, albeit somewhat complex thing to learn. Still, go check it out. Possible starting points are RDFa.info and the W3C's RDFa Primer.
The Canvas Element - Canvas is a piece of HTML5 (sort of) related to pixel rendering via JavaScript. I'm not 100% sold on it, due to a number of ease-of-use limitations (anything drawn in Canvas lacks any sort of "handle" to manipulate them unless you're building some construct in Javascript to hold the data as a placeholder for you), but it can be used in some very powerful ways. In particular, the guys at Mozilla Labs have brought us Bespin (a cloud-based project editor) thanks to Canvas. Between SVG and Canvas, I'm hoping IE focuses on SVG support first, since I think it's transperancy (data in SVG elements are visible to search engines, which isn't true of things drawn in Canvas), but I think that there's plenty of promise with this. Mozilla provides a nice starter tutorial on the topic here.
In Closing
There's a number of things that conferences provide that you can't get from just looking stuff up on the web. Chief among them are personal face time with other people who care deeply about the same things you do. Web Directions North provided that and more, causing all sorts of fascinating collisions of ideas over yogurt, beer, burger sliders, trail mix, chicken, and any other number of meals and beverages. I'm sitting on a volatile stack of ideas that I need to start implementing right away. However, for those of you that weren't there, I hope all the links I provided will do two things for you: 1. Give you a check-off list of important things to learn about to keep relevant in the industry, and 2. Help reinforce the idea that there's a ton of free information online directly related to what we do for a living. All you have to do is start digging for it. Conferences are the social tip of the iceburg, a place to get a breath of fresh air and commune with other website people about the industry. But after the long flight home, the majority of all the rich information is floating in the web below the surface.
