The things browsers can do – SAE Alumni Conference, Berlin 2014

Two days ago I was in Berlin for a day to present at the SAE alumni Conference in Berlin, Germany. I knew nothing about SAE before I went there except for the ads I see on the Tube in London. I was pretty amazed to see just how big a community the alumni and chapters of this school are. And how proud they are.

My presentation The things browsers can do – go play with the web was a trial-run of a talk I will re-hash a bit at a few more conferences to come.

In essence, the thing I wanted to bring across is that HTML5 has now matured and is soon a recommendation.

And along the way we seem to have lost the excitement for it. One too many shiny HTML5 demo telling us we need a certain browser to enjoy the web. One more polyfill and library telling us without this extra overhead HTML5 isn’t ready. One more article telling us just how broken this one week old experimental implementation of the standard is. All of this left us tainted. We didn’t believe in HTML5 as a viable solution but something that is a compilation target instead.

In this talk I wanted to remind people just how much better browser support for the basic parts of HTML5 and friends is right now. And what you can do with it beyond impressive demos. No whizzbang examples here, but things you can use now. With a bit of effort you can even use them without pestering browsers that don’t support what you want to achieve. It is not about bringing modern functionality to all – browsers; it is about giving people things that work.

I recorded a screencast and put it on YouTube

The slides are on Slideshare.

All in all I enjoyed the convention and want to thank the organizers for having me and looking after me in an excellent fashion. It was refreshing to meet students who don’t have time to agonize which of the three task runners released this week to use. Instead who have to deliver something right now and in a working fashion. This makes a difference