Last week the Converge SE conference in Columbia, South Carolina attracted about 400 designers, developers and product managers to attend workshops and hear keynotes about all that is new and great in web development.

As you can see on the conference schedule the conference covered a lot of topics, ranging from building communities and providing great end user service over creating engaging video demos up to using CSS pseudo selectors, web fonts and responsive design.

It was especially refreshing to see that instead of showing theoretical examples or demos most of the speakers showed the new technologies as they used them in real products. Ethan Marcotte for example previewed the upcoming Boston Globe redesign to the audience.

Mozilla’s involvement (apart from sponsoring the event) was a keynote on the why of HTML5. In 96 slides and just above 30 minutes I explained:

• How HTML5 came to be
• Why it is not about selling browsers or hardware or comparing yourself with the competition
• That HTML5 is part of a larger world of new technologies
• That HTML5 means first and foremost improving the infrastructure for web applications and using the hardware and software people use to their full potentials
• That using HTML5 means a shift in our thinking as web developers and needs re-evaluation of some of our “best practices”
• That everybody should start using it and help us make it really work instead of being amazed by cool demos but failing to use these new technologies in day to day products

The slides are available on Slideshare:

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

Converge SE was filmed, so I am quite sure the videos will be out soon and you will find more of the presentations using the convergese tag.