Anil Dash—Next Year’s Web
Framework for deciding what will be the web in 2010: how people make it happen, how it evolves
- Do we take for granted the ability to create the web? Kids implicitly understand the web’s inate content creation.
- Building communities around niche interests—this would not be possible in other mediums e.g. LOLcats site.
This year’s web review
- Google: innovation comes from outside, the fate of large companies. (e.g. Google Wave, an Australian invention) i.e. not the web is not Silicon Valley centric, the cult status is not necessary.
- Microsoft: making a come-back? More humble, more user-centric. Ray Ozzie’s influence: decentralised collaborative tools.
- Yahoo: insecure? People leaving, not trustworthy. APIs unsustainable.
- amazon.com Kindle: all aspects of the product make money, the hardware and the software. i.e. not phone plans where the contact pays for the hardware. Cloud computing services, radical shift -> cheaper, financial incentive to use particular systems -> next commoditised machines to run the platform?
- Twitter. Power? A category (like blogging), not a single product. Entanglements: $150m VC funding, suggested users list, trending of building stuff onto the system, i.e. past of least resistance for short messages, but what consequences are there for developing on this?
- Facebook. It’s ivy-league university formation flavours the entire experience? Not customisable, locked down. What culture and community values are represented?
- AOL lessons: provided 1/3 of all internet access in US in their heyday—they “controlled the internet” including custom apps developed in “rainmain”, a proprietary API. Current exemplars include the iTunes App Store? Facebook applications? Open email won in the end (SMTP, POP3, HTML) and increased value in the network.
Ways to think about the web
- “Made of web” companies. What’s the largest social network? The web.
- Web is not immune from trends that have affected the transformation of traditional media. i.e. market share / eyeballs on TV channels -> no one winner, the networks will organise themselves into a long tail. “Mainstream” is at the top of the social media long tail -> are these equivalent to the old media networks? How do we benefit from walled gardens?
- A focussed community works better, organisations need to embrace obligations to web community. The power shifts to creators. e.g. YouTube mass media crap.
- Culture drives adoption. e.g. Opera on Twitter, part of the language.
- Niches are still there, site evolution of Gondwana land -> countries.
2010 web hints
- The “push button” web, real-time updates e.g. RSSCloud, PubSubHubBub
- Features bubbled up from community e.g. OpenID. GetUp an example?
Scott Gledhill—Entering the mobile space
- Personas in mobile?
- Gen Y + Z will have lots of buying power in next 5 years? Really high mobile usage, almost 100%, increasing mobile web access too.
- Used during in-between time.
- Where are you?
- Mobile 2.o hype -> parallel to 1999 web? overhyped?
- Eye candy is a critical business requirement
- Mobile = device fragmentation
- Learning Javascript: recursion, HTML
- Learning CSS
- Mobile web (open) v.s. custom apps.
Dmitry Baranovskiy—JavaScript libraries
- Altassain building their own JS library.
- Categories: low-level libraries, high-level libraries, toolboxes and widgets.
- The API is more important than the functionality. e.g. Twitter. English majors will do well.
- Library is the answer -> what are the questions: make something useful.
- Who is the target? Java, Ruby, PHP, JS.
- The best APIs have a simple use which implements (abstracts) complex functionality.
- Don’t try and move outside the “feel” of JS: it’s your friend.
- Performance: target IE6 and everywhere else will run fast.
- Replace for loops with while loops.
- Cache results of function calculations e.g. parsing colour values.
- Book: JavaScript Performance Rocks! by Fuch T & Hoy A.
- Animation: lots of functions looping, watch performance of those functions, memory leaks, don’t trust timeout values.
- Bullet proof: plays nice with other scripts and libraries
- watch use of global space: treat it like a public toilet!
- native prototypes: be careful with these.
- avoid object.prototype and this. accessors.
- beware of iframes: different array objects to windows
- undefined is not a constant, it’s a variable and can be assigned a value!
- Packaging
- size of JS code matters! (different to other languages)
- minify / pack / obfuscate: best to YUI compress, then GZIP (alternatives JSmin, Dojo shrink safe, Packer (just minify: smaller, but slower)
- YUI compressor trick: make functions into local variables especially if they are used lots in the code, but be careful that it does not take longer to execute.
- Error handling: most times it’s best not to write an error handling function, this allows the developer to see which line of code has the error.
- JSLint. Use it.
- DOM is a big bottleneck.
Nick Cowie—Progressive enhancement with CSS
- State Library of WA
- User trust (huge impact of eye-candy) e.g. CannyBill
- Surfin Safari
- CSS3.info
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