The Progressive Web with Andy Hume (LWS Future)
Posted on by Steve Workman About 1 min reading time
Monday night (16th August 2010) was London Web Standards' 'Web Futures' event with presentations from Clear Left's Andy Hume (@andyhume) and Richard Rutter (@clagnut).
This is part covering Andy's talk which was on "The Progressive Web". First up, my sketchnotes.
The basic message of Andy's talk is that the landscape of the web these days (note my awesome rolling hills) has changed and people should be more open to these new techniques. By designing and coding sites for today and tomorrow, you are not only reducing the amount of work you have to do now, but you're decreasing the number of bugs, not having to re-do gradients for high-resolution displays, and you're also making your web site faster, which is directly linked to revenue. There's no reason not to add these things in now unless you're designing entirely for IE6.
Andy talked extensively about @media queries, how these should be used instead of browser sniffing (read: should do feature detection) and how they can make simple websites work better across more web-enabled devices. He demonstrated the dConstruct website as a good example of this.
Andy put up two great slides, one on when you can use HTML5/CSS3 standards today, and where you should use intermediaries like jQuery. The other slide is poorly reproduced in my sketchnotes (middle-right), showing the cycle between standards, new hacks, old hacks and back to standards. This indicates a whole new era of innovation in the web now that we have these new standards.
So, a great talk by Andy. Read part two, on the future of web typography by Richard Rutter.