Conferences Articles

In this post I round-up my first time at FOSDEM and the two talks I gave during my time there; one on open Web apps and the other on creating games with HTML5.

Continued…

A few days ago I was asked to deliver the first talk of the amazing Beyond Tellerand conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. The talk Breaking the barriers – moving browsers and the web forward introduced a lot of new ideas and technologies that are worked on my Mozilla and others to make the web of the future better.

Here is the video of the presentation with jump points and links to more information. If you want to see the slides of the talk, they are available here and there is also an audio recording on archive.org.

Breaking the barriers – moving browsers and the web forward from marc thiele on Vimeo.

Here’s what is covered in the talk:

1. Modern web technologies of HTML5 and friends that can be used right now (with 64 myself as a demo) [03:50 - 07:19]
   • Rich HTML semantics (HTML5)
   • Self-validating forms (HTML5)
   • Richer form controls with fallbacks (HTML5)
   • Canvas for painting in the browser (HTML5)
   • CSS gradients, multiple backgrounds, animation and transition
   • CSS 3D transforms
   • Local storage and offline storage
   • SVG for scalable and interactive graphics
   • RequestAnimationFrame for secure animation
   • History API
   • WebGL
2. Taking on challenges – we need you to show the world that web technology is good enough to do jobs that in the past were only possible with native or server-side code (with Joe Lambert’s image unshredder as the example) [07:20 - 08:04]
3. Breaking the browser mould – showing that the browser interfaces can be manipulated with HTML and JS (with browser menus, context menus and the Fullscreen API as examples) [08:05 - 10:54]
4. Developing with the web – developer tools in browsers and done in client side technologies (with Hackasaurus, Cloud 9 IDE, Firefox Scratchpad, Firefox Style Editor, Parse error display in view-source and Tilt as examples) [10:55 - 17:24]
5. Online identity and issues with current login systems (with BrowserID as a solution to a lot of the problems we have right now) [17:25 - 29:35]
6. Apps, the shortcomings and myths of native apps and the opportunity to build hybrid apps with web technologies (with Open Web Apps and Web Intents as examples) [29:36 - 37:34]
7. Moving web technologies into the mobile space (with Are we mobile yet? and Boot to Gecko as demos) [37:35 - 40:11]
8. How can you help? [40:12 - 42:33]

This year’s Velocity EU conference had a special presentation round where browser makers talked about the performance of their specific products. I was invited last minute to represent Firefox and originally was asked to show benchmarks, impressive demos and how we compare to others. As browsers get released in very short intervals these days, this doesn’t quite make sense any longer – at least to me.

Funnily enough the other browser representatives took the same approach so I was happy to see that we agreed that we are beyond number-comparisons and head to head browser war on performance.

My talk “Accelerating the overall web experience” covered other things, like that the choice of which browser to use lies with the users and there is not much we can do to change that. I also pointed out that users will find a way to make our browsers slow, no matter how hard we try and that in a lot of cases third party add-ons and debugging tools are to blame for an impression of slowness.

I ended by showing how the new developer tools in Firefox empower developers to perform much better in finding bugs and fixing them – a part of performance that is not easily measurable but very important.

You can see the slides here (left+right to go back and forward, down for next bullet point and N to toggle notes) or read them as an HTML page:

There is also an audio recording of the talk on archive.org:

All in all it was good to see that all browsers are getting faster and faster and we all see this as a given rather than a goal.

A day ago or so we asked who wants to come to Full Frontal with us, and a few people have given good reasons. We used state of the art algorithms also used in social media impact products (Math.random) to pick the lucky winners. And they are:

• Esteban Saiz who will also join us the speaker dinner
• Saqib Shaikh
• Craig Moore

See you all at Full Frontal!

photo by Lily

Full Frontal is a JavaScript centric conference in Brighton, England on the 11/11/11. The simplest way to describe it is “a splendid kick into your lower back side” event when it comes to what’s hot and amazing int he world of scripting.

The Mozilla Developer Network has 3 tickets to give out, one of which also entitles you to attend the speakers dinner the day before the conference. Tickets for the conference are gone, so here is your last chance.

If you want to take part in this, you need to be able to get to Brighton, England on the 11th and be open to also come on the 10th for the speaker’s dinner (one of you). Please say if you can’t come on the 10th – you can still win a ticket. We will need your name for the organisers to put on the list.

First and foremost though, in order to win a ticket add a comment here why you deserve to get a Mozilla ticket and what you can do as a thank you to help the open web.

The best reasons and offers will get the tickets. We will announce the pick on the 9th here and contact you so please leave a valid email in the comment (this will not be shown to the public).

For extra brownie points, why not tell us what new initiatives of Mozilla get you most excited and what we could be doing to make them a reality faster.

See you in Brighton, it rocks!

We picked the winners, now! Let’s get full frontal!

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Web Developer Conference in Bristol. This was the fifth conference in the event’s history and was attended by well over 200 Web designers and developers from across the UK.

In my talk I covered some Web technologies that are on the horizon and coming your way in the near future. Some topics of particular interest are the WebAPIs that we’re working on, with the WebVibrator API easily being the most popular amongst the attendees (no idea why).

But in all seriousness, it was a great event and I’m glad to see some of the attendees exploring these new technologies as a result of the talk.

You can check out the slides below:

Today was the HTML5 live conference in London, England. In this one day conference around 150 attendees learned the why of HTML5, and how to implement it in the current work environment.

As Mozilla’s representative I was asked to give a talk on how we are faring as a movement when it comes to HTML5. In the talk Rocking the boat – and causing a ripple I discussed the necessity to take HTML5 away from something to build cool demos in to be used in day to day products so we can find and report bugs. I also covered a few of the issues that are cropping up like “best viewed with browser X” products and trying to impress users by listing the technologies used rather than just using them to improve the overall experience. In the end we also list some of the new technologies and products Mozilla is working on to make the web a real application platform that has the same access that native applications have.

The slides are embedded below and use a modified DZSlides as the system. Focus on them and use the cursor keys to navigate. Display bullet points by pressing space and show and hide the notes by pressing N. Alternatively you can also see the slides a simple web page.

The audio recording of the talk is available at archive.org

At the just-finished JSConf.eu (European JavaScript Conference), Mozilla sponsored the Hacker Lounge, and held a doc sprint during the conference.

The conference kicked off with Bella Morningstar, president of the Brendan Eich Fan Club (a.k.a. Mandy Lauderdale), serenading Brendan:

JSConf.eu opening song – JavaScript Will Listen from Alexander Lang on Vimeo.

Later, at Brendan’s request, he received a hand-crafted “Mandy Fan Club” t-shirt. That t-shirt, in turn, was auctioned at the end of the conference to support the wonderful work of Coder Dojo, led by James Whelton, which teaches programming skills to kids in Ireland. Holger Blank won the auction on behalf of JSConf.eu, donating 1500 euros to Coder Dojo.

For the doc sprint, the Hacker Lounge turned out to be less than ideal for concentrated work, thanks to the digital foosball table, but the sprinters found plenty of places to sit and work in Alte Münze, which was an amazing conference venue.

Here’s what the sprinters at JSConf.eu accomplished:

• David Bruant fixed up freeze(), forEach(), watch(), DOM event, and Node.textContent; fixed the example in element.addEventListener(); added a bunch of events to the DOM event reference page with info from Philip Tellis; created a page for the error event.
• Colby Russell reviewed and improved the Array and String pages, removing the NeedsTechnicalReview tags.
• Burak Yiğit Kaya reviewed, fixed up and removed the NeedsTechnicalReview tag from this, DOM storage, the Function constructor, encodeURI(), and regular expressions.
• Louis-Rémi Babé documented usage of cross-origin images with Canvas.
• After joining MDN during the conference, Paul Campbell reviewed and edited the RegExp page. Thanks for pitching in!

We also had remote contributions:

• Jean-Yves Perrier updated and added examples to a bunch of pages for CSS data types (such as <angle>, <ratio>, and so on).
• Jonathan Willson added browser compatibility tables and info to several DOM properties.
• Kevin Lim continued to improve the IndexedDB docs.
• yyss translated Animating objects with WebGL into Japanese.
• Berker Peksag fixed the code example and added a browser compatibility table to event.button and added an example to element.scrollLeft.

We also had moral support from Tom Schuster, Neil Rashbrook, Jeff Griffiths (who also helped Franz Enzenhofer isolate a possible Canvas bug in Firefox), Chris Heilmann, and Dietrich Ayala. Thanks!

Big thanks to Jared Wyles for mentioning the doc sprint during his talk. I’ll hold him to his request for peer pressure to work on open source!

Thanks also to Holger Blank and the rest of the JSConf organizers for putting on an excellent conference, and accommodating Mozilla’s ticket purchase requests.

And thanks finally to Chris Williams for suggesting that we hold the sprint during the conference, and for mentioning it in his inspiring closing keynote. One of the points he made during that keynote is that releasing software as open source is like baring a little piece of your soul. This conference reminded me yet again what an honor it is for me to work together with the thousands of people who pour little bits of their souls into the Mozilla project to create open source software and documentation to keep the Web open for everyone.

The Kings of code conference in Amsterdam attracted a few hundred backend developers. Part hackday, part conference, Kings of Code spans over a few days and brings together developers from various backgrounds. The ambitious goal of the Mozilla keynote was to cover the relevant parts of HTML5 and CSS3 for this audience in 25 minutes.

The presentation slides are available here and embedded below (use cursor keys to navigate back and forth and hit ‘n’ to show and hide the notes):

The audio recording of the talk (raw, unedited) is available on archive.org.

Overall the reaction was good, and we hope we managed to bust some myths and look forward to see what people do with the inspiration.

We’re very excited to announce that Mozilla is sponsoring the Hacker Lounge at JSConf.eu and we will be holding a doc sprint at and during the conference. The focus of this doc sprint will naturally be docs for JavaScript and DOM. We hope to encourage attendees at the conference to contribute at least a little to improving the JS and DOM docs on MDN. I and a handful of MDN community members will be there to show them how.

To that end, we want to tag as many JS and DOM articles as possible, with tags indicating what work needs to be done on those articles. That way, anybody dropping in during the sprint (or anytime later) can look for tagged articles and find something to work on.

Here are some of the tags we use to indicate that an article needs help:

• NeedsTechnicalReview: needs someone to verify that the technical information is complete and correct.
• NeedsExample: needs one or more illustrative code examples of the item documented.
• NeedsContent: the item is incomplete and needs to be filled out.
• NeedsJSVersion: needs information about the version of JavaScript and EcmaScript this item first appears in.
• NeedsBrowserCompatibility: needs a browser compatibility table or needs the table filled out.
• MakeBrowserAgnostic: the article is written with a focus on Gecko, when it is actually about a standard function or feature, which should be rewritten to be generic.

Please help by tagging articles in MDN that need work with the appropriate tag. You can use the Talk page for each article to elaborate on what needs to be done, if the tag is not descriptive enough. To modify tags on an article, login to MDN and click Edit Tags at the bottom of the page.

The wiki page for the doc sprint has links to queries for some of these tags.

If you will be at JSConf.eu, I look forward to seeing you there! If you will be participating remotely, I’ll see you online!