I am currently in Las Vegas for the Anglebrackets conference and after suffering a American country music festival in my hotel I got up this morning to deliver the keynote, talking about using web standards and approaching web development in a simpler fashion. Here is the abstract.

Web development as it is right now suffers from an obesity problem. When computers and connections were slow we had to be frugal with our resources and optimised for the user, and not for us as developers. Our amazing machines and fast connections now allow us to not worry too much about page weight and dependencies. Or so we think. The move of our end users from desktop machines to mobile environments mean that a lot of what our products need is not available and – without being able to test those scenarios – we deliver a terrible experience. In this talk Chris Heilmann of Mozilla is going to show how using HTML5 and plain JavaScript together with CSS can help us build fast, beautiful experiences for the desktop and the mobile web and the next generation of platforms around the corner.

The slides are available online and the screencast is on YouTube

Update: Video and Transcript are now available

I just got off stage at the HTML5 Developer conference in San Francisco, California. The massive ballroom was packed with folk and my task was to set the mood for the day and be inspiring. Turns out it seems it worked well.

The abstract I submitted was this:

When the web came around it shook the foundation of IT at that time. World wide distribution independent of platform and environment? People allowed to write code without having a degree, a beard or suspenders? Unthinkable! Now we are the mainstream and the pendulum swings the other way – we are the disruption target and we lose our users to closed, specialised environments. Or do we? There is nothing stopping you from dazzling audiences with web technologies – all you need to do is to get back some of the excitement we felt when we fought the machine. In this keynote Chris Heilmann will show how you can get your web mojo back and reach a market of millions of new users that will be available to you this year. All you need to do is to give your web apps more love and stop trying to copy what you cannot deliver.

Here are the materials of the talk – and I will release the notes in a cleaner fashion later.

The slides are on the web and a screencast on YouTube. This is a raw screencast recorded on stage, so the sound quality is not the best. There was a video recording and you should soon be able to see that online.

Here are the links I talk about:

• webmaker.org/
• Jobs’ original vision – no third party native apps
• www.storyofstuff.org
• Victor Lebow on Wikipedia
• Detailed article and original paper
• Clifford Brooks Stevens on Wikipedia
• Planned Obsolescence on Wikipedia
• fff.cmiscm.com/
• Making of Fastbook
• Using WebAPIs to make the web layer more capable
• wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebActivities
• Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming
• @codepo8