HTML5 shiv history, discontent and ski jumping – the smashing mag meetup

I am right now in my hotel room after the smashing magazine meetup in Stuttgart waving good-bye to each byte of the audio recording of my talk as it is uploading to archive.org (Update: it is done now). I had a great time at the meetup and want to thank Lisa, Vitaly and the others of Smashing Magazine and the Stuttgart GTUG for organising and having us.

Paul Irish’s talk HTML5 history and terminology was a good reminder on why things are the way they are in HTML5, how the HTML5 Shiv came to be and explained some terminology in detail. You can see his slides here

My own talk was more or less the blog post I wrote yesterday on discontent in the web design world but with a comparison to Ski Jumping and bringing the need for discussion and explanation home. I urged people not to repeat “best practices” and “useful shortcuts” blindly but consider the consequences instead. I also plead for less preaching and more assistance in creating new and modern web products with good approaches from the past.

The slides are available here (left+right to go back and forward, down for next bullet point and N to toggle notes):

The audio of the talk is available on archive.org

There were great questions from the audience and after the talk Paul, Vitaly and me also recorded a Podcast for Workingdraft.de which should be out soon.

Again, thanks for organising, and I had good fun there! See you next time.

Tags: chrisheilmann, gtug, html5, paulirish, smmeetup, stuttgart