I just came back from giving my first talk in Taiwan and I have to say it seemed to have worked out well. The room was packed and people asked very good questions afterwards.

[slideshare id=1297512&doc=1297512]

• Download the slides The road to professional web development – PDF 11MB

In the slides I covered the history of web development, what we did wrong and what we should avoid in the future. I also covered the YUI and how it embodies some of the priniciples great web development is based on.

Update: Liang-Bin Hsueh posted an audio recording of the talk missing only the first five minutes.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Currently being in Taiwan after a long flight from London via Hongkong (Slumdog Millionaire – win, Memento – win, Marley and me – surprising win, Bolt – looks like put together from recycled other animated movies) and scoring a room on the 35th floor with view of Taipei and 101: The hotel also is the first one not to have a complimentary bible but a nice novel to read on the bedside table. Today and I will be interviewing with the media. What I was very positively surprised about was that the media wants to chat predominantly about accessibility ! This afternoon and tomorrow and then speaking at two universities about best practices in web development. Check out the cool icons for people attending at the bottom of the page. Saturday there’ll be an open developer evening together with Rasmus Lerdorf.
• Started reading Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe on the plane which reminds me of The Starfish and the Spider
• Getting ready to go to Australia for the Web Directions Roadshow and speaking next Wednesday in our office in Sydney at the first Yahoo7 Open Session about YQL and other open things full of awesome.

Things found on the intertubes:

• Pulp browsers re-enacts the iconic pulp fiction scene with Safari, Firefox and IE6. Yes, IE6 dies.
• Brothercake gives us 10 cool things we can do once IE6 is dead
• An amazing singer on Britain’s got talent (a rare occasion in itself) shows us that you should never judge a book by its cover.
• Apparently all squeaking doors in old horror movies were really a Chihuahua
• I am not sure if we really needed a chair that sends twitter updates when the person it it farts but the hardware behind it is cool.
• Scott Schiller shows his take on the Digg bar – his numerous manifestiations of a fetish for rubber chicken lately worry me though.

Distributing your information all over the web has become a common practice over the last few years and it makes a lot of sense. By covering lots of distribution channels you can reach various audiences and get comments and feedback from them.

You also make yourself independent of a single online resource – if your server is unavailable your data is still around. I could go on with the benefits of distribution (after all I’ve written a book on the subject) but let’s take a look on the flipside: by spreading your data all over the web you also spread yourself thin and you want a single resource to act as your main URL.

People have been telling me for a while that they don’t have time to find all the things I leave across the web and that they are wondering if there’s a single entry point. One Solution is FriendFeed but you want to be able to style your “online profile” more than that.

This is where YQL comes into the equation. Using YQL, a YUI CSS grid, a few dozen lines of PHP and a bit of CSS I managed to pull together My online portfolio http://icant.co.uk and you can do this as easily. The following screencast shows you how it is done:

You can also download a readable version of the screencast for ipods.

Since I put together the screencast (which was a bit hurried as I needed to catch a flight) I’ve updated the idea with yet another script that scrapes the resulting HTML document to create an RSS feed of all my data on the web.

• Check out the source of index.php
• Check out the source of feed.php

Using YQL has a few more benefits than reading all the different sources yourself and mixing them up: the results are cached for you, YQL’s connection to the web is very much likely to be faster than yours which makes the fetching process easier and you have full control over what’s happening as YQL output gives you diagnostics information.

I’ll talk more about in YQL in various talks in the nearer future, and there are even more interesting changes to the system itself around the corner. Stay alert for awesome updates.

Here’s something that put a smile on my face this morning that needs to be jackhammered off: Tweenbots. Kacie Kinzer wondered if people are ready to help a friendly, but dumb robot and build a small robot with a smile and a little flag saying where it needs to go. All the robot can do is move forwards.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

The results are shown in this wonderful video:

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

Now all we need to do is deal the same way with other human beings! The other thing it proves is that cute beats smart.

Other things that made me happy this morning:

• Sticking with the robot theme, here’s an awesome Wall-E case mod
• The BackTweets API is terribly useful to see who tweeted your links, it even knows all the shorturl redirects
• Disney shows that all those people who say templates are bad and will not allow you to be successful are wrong. Apparently Disney made one movie and then traced a lot
• Here’s an interesting design concept of a watch in braille
• The Guardian content API is apparently great to track the use of swearwords over time

I am right now teaching a four day class of DOM and Ajax in Sunnyvale, California and also do some tech editing for Scriptin with JavaScript and Ajax by Charles Wyke-Smith and I find one thing that is pretty worrying: easy examples of web development practices are dangerous to show these days.

I’m talking about practices that make it easy to get quick results and give readers and attendees “I am getting this – this is easy” fuzzy warm feelings.

One very obvious example is form validation and re-rendering of a form using PHP_SELF and displaying user data using $_GET or $_POST. Unfiltered they are a free invitation for any XSS attack and will turn your server into a spam-hub or bot-net drone. Explaining countermeasures of XSS normally is out of scope for an example that only shows how a form would work that you enhance progressively.

The same applies to simply outdated ideas like onevent handlers. It is easy to show an example that uses a few onclick handlers, but explaining event handling really well takes a bit of time. Again, this is something that really does not fit in the scope of a DOM course.

I do however think that it is important to get it in there, as there is no such thing as knowing one technology in the web development stack and being able to use it. There’s a lot of overlap with other areas and in order to be a good developer and play well with others you need to be aware of your effects and areas of overlap with your colleagues’ skill-sets.

The other extreme I find myself doing is being too over-cautious. I went through the tough times of the first browser wars and got a deep-rooted mistrust towards anything some browser tells me is OK to do and use. However, I get the feeling that it doesn’t really matter any more if Internet Explorer has a problem with name vs. ID or whatever other shenanigans we have to be aware of when we build things from scratch.

I do get the distinct feeling that not building on top of a good client-side library is simply a waste of time these days. Libraries allow us to write code, not to work around bugs and wonder what other safety measure we have to put in.

That’s why I started asking people in my courses to use Firefox with Firebug and use a good text editor to code along. Today I managed to breeze through how to write HTML that is ready for internationalisation and works with assistive technology, over simple DOM access to the document and at the end writing a validation script for a form using generated DOM content. By concentrating on how things are meant to work instead of debugging random issues I managed to get the students to reach far into the matter in a day – even those who never touched JavaScript before.

Maybe it is time to get beginners accustomed to a market that builds on working solutions and benefits from browser abstraction via libraries than teaching developing from total scratch – bad browsers and bad people taking advantage of any technology to gain access or spam us seem to have made this way of working redundant.