Christian Heilmann

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

Saturday, October 25th, 2014 at 1:00 pm

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.

SAE Afterparty

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.

Techno nightmare by @elektrojunge

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.

The things browsers can do! SAE Alumni Convention 2014 from Christian Heilmann

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

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Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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