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@media Ajax 2007 Day 1

November 22nd, 2007 by johnap

Scanning through the list of speakers and their subject matter, day 1 of @media Ajax looked like it wasn’t going to make my head hurt too much. Largely a day of “here’s how things are right now” talks - with one or 2 exceptions it gave us all a chance to ease our way into it.
The ecclesiastical setting of Church House round the back of Westminster Abbey seemed slightly odd, and we all had to make a bit of a detour, as it was the Queen and Prince Philip’s 60th wedding anniversary thing in the Abbey that day.

“The State of Ajax” - Dion Almer and Ben Galbraith
Things got off with a suitably programmed “State of Ajax” talk by the Ajaxian people (Dion Almer and Ben Galbraith) - I tried using the Wifi at that point - BIG FAIL FOR THE WIFI I’m afraid to say. So, instead I did my best to get things down in Mind Map form (use Freemind to look at this file). Down to a few points of interest:

• Browser performance still largely sucks (setting aside Tamarin and Webkit advances) - although ScreamingMonkey may be a handy stop-gap for IE.
• Offline developments are exciting (Google Gears etc.)
• Mobile has had a serious boot up the arse with the advent of iPhone and Android
• Javascript 2 proposals are causing a lot of argey-bargey (more on this later)
• WHAT-WG is a new emerging “standards” group aiming to push along the stagnating process at W3C
• Ajax is moving out of the browser - with Adobe Air, Widgets etc.
• Security advances being worked on with things like Google’s Caja project.
• Javascript libraries are starting to converge in style/content

“But I’m a Designer” - Mike Stenhouse
Clearly rather nervous, Mike, a designer with developer leanings eased into his talk, and once he got to the point, put across some quite interesting ideas for working with designers in the the Agile process - designers often seem to live “outside” of the agile world of developers despite being a vital aspect of a successful web development project. Nothing earth shattering, but some food for thought.

“Real World Accessibility for Ajax Enhanced Applications” - Derek Featherstone
I really enjoyed Derek’s talk at last years dConstruct - one of the first times I’d heard anyone properly try to address the common Accessibility objections people raise against using Ajax. This talk delved a bit deeper. Some points I came away with included:

• When building an application/page/widget start with the structure, not how it will work - i.e. HTML, then CSS, then the Javascript to functionally enhance it. A good idea really, because you start off by giving it meaning.
• Divs with background images and event listeners are a bad thing - e.g. the control widgets used in Google Maps
• If the only way to discover something is by hovering over it, this is bad.
• Live updates are a problem - there are some hacks that need to be used to inform screen-readers.
• It’s difficult to tell the user what a “widget” does (it’s role) semantically at the moment - The ARIA initiative has proposed a “role” attribute for tags (e.g. role=”menu”)

Once again entertaining and full of practical and pragmatic incites, this was a highlight for me.

“How to Destroy the Web” - Stuart Langridge
A good choice for the after-lunch napping spot, Mr.Langridge delivered an ironic call to arms for us all to develop and deliver applications that will “destroy the web” by ignoring potentially good practice like :

• Compressing javascript files
• Not polling the server excessively
• Using Comet to get around the above problem

Funny and at times mildly disturbing. Hmmmmm.

Stuart Langridge Slide and follow-up here

“Planning Javascript and Ajax for Larger Teams” - Christian Heillman
I was mildly disappointed by the head honcho from the YUI project at Yahoo! for this one. Apart from a few notable quotes/ideas I’m struggling to remember an awful lot about this one - apart from :

• Try to avoid “innovating” during production coding - at first this seemed a bit strange, but it was later qualified with the proviso that “individuals” doing this and not sharing the innovation was a bad thing.
• A paraphrasing of the a classic German/English warning notice which came out as:
  • “Don’t fiddle with other peoples knobs unless you know what you are doing.”

One thing that did emerge was the sensible advice that knowledge and expertise should always be shared around as much as possible in teams (and outside as well I suppose). General entertaining pragmatic real-world sense through-out though.

Christian Heilmann Slides and follow-up here

“Ajax At Work: A Case Study” - Peter Paul Koch
PPK is certainly another lively and entertaining character, and his very useful Quirksmode blog is very handy, however I struggled to be much out of his talk. He used the case study of building (or half building) an ajax enable family tree application. Unfortunately, general babbling and a lack of acknowledgment of the importance of a strong server-side strategy tht would be need for a challenging app like this left me feeling a bit cheated.

I did come away with the following thoughts, whilst dashing down the road for an enjoyable after party:

• Edward IV never had a play written about him by Shakespeare because he was of dodgy parentage.
• If you can solve an interactive web interface problem using frames, maybe you shouldn’t be using ajax - so, er, we all to use frames in that situation?!

PPK slides and follow-up here

So, a pretty good first day, but without a great deal of real technical meat, I was kind of expecting that though - question is, would the Wifi issue get resolved?….

Tags: @media ajax, Ajax, atmedia, Conference, Javascript

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