CSS Summit 2012, my first online conference

In early August, we managed to attend the fourth, annual CSS Summit online conference. The conference was held for 3 days in a row with reports broken down in the following areas: CSS3 training, Advanced CSS, Preprocessors. All reports are in English.

For us, this was the first experience of attending online conferences, and even if you are not particularly interested in customer development, you may be interested in reading about the format of holding such conferences.
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Records of reports both from the entire conference and for individual days can be bought on the official website . Promo code, with a 20% discount - “20SNOOK”.

Under the cut a few words about the organization of the event, links to presentations and a small summary of interesting abstracts and thoughts about web development.

How it was

On these dates, we specially gathered the whole team in the Riga office and tuned in to the American time zone (in Riga time, the conference was held from 17.00 to 24:00). It was expected that all the speakers would broadcast from one place, and in general the event would be similar to broadcasting an ordinary offline conference, but unfortunately ... the speakers were rather poorly prepared, from their homes and offices, half asleep in a voice (and someone read from the sheet) reports. Throughout all the sessions, the impression was that the speaker narrated not to the public, but to a colleague, over a cup of coffee, with all sorts of “uh ...” (parasitic words), various stumbles and jambs with slides.

However, the organizers themselves did their best, there was no communication interruption, the video recordings were delivered on time, the reports were strictly on the program. Broadcasting went through Adobe Connect .

A few words from the main organizer of the conference, Christopher Schmitt

Abstract

At the very beginning of the conference, everyone was immediately warned that the slides cannot be distributed only if the author himself publishes them or puts them in a publicly accessible place, so I’ll tell you and leave only the links for open presentations.

Web Typography

Trent walton slides

In his report, Trent began with the basics of web typography, continued examples of creative use of web typography, and shared links to interesting plugins for advanced work with text on the web:

• fittextjs.com - responsive text ala responsive design
• letteringjs.com is an interesting plugin giving full control over each letter and line of text.
• beta.typecastapp.com - online web printing service

CSS3 Selectors

Rachel andrew slides

The whole team agreed that the report of Rachel was the most interesting and informative, and nothing was inferior to her previous offline performance at Front Trends 2012 .
She talked about the possibilities of pseudo-classes and pseudo elements that came to us along with CSS3. Of particular interest, for me, was the opening of selectors for working with forms, such as: valid,: invalid,: in-range, etc.

A little more about selectors on HTML5 Please .

Media Queries & Viewport

Chris Mills slides

I don’t know how Chris works as an evangelist, but his monotonous performance almost put to sleep the whole meeting, I had to go play the next room in table tennis. But the slides are worth watching.

For myself, said:

• “The web is responsive by default” Chris Mills.
• You can use media queries to determine “everything except” - media not smthg.

Back stage of the report of Chris ( from Twitter ).

CSS3 & Transforms

Tiffany Brown, slides , demos , recordings

The report was frankly weak, but the slides were well prepared, I advise you to view.

CSS3 Transitions & Animations

Estelle Weyl slides

In detail about CSS3 animations and transients, if you are still using JS for animations on the web, then it’s time for you to change your profession.

CSS3 Polyfills

Jason Johnston , slides

What are polyfiles?
“A piece of code (or plugin) Remy Sharp (approx. Translation - a plugin, or a piece of code that implements support for modern standards in those browsers where not provided natively).

Selectivizr , Modernizr , CSS3 Pie and a couple of interesting links in slides.

Essential Tools for UI Performance

Nicole sullivan

Overview of services and tools for performance testing, as well as, a few words about the compression of styles, scripts and image optimization. Unfortunately, there are no slides in open access, only a couple of links to services:

• www.lognormal.com
• www.webpagetest.org
• developer.yahoo.com/yslow
• addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/dust-me-selectors - plugin for searching unused selectors

Notes:

• View Themes tab in Chrome canary
• Google Analytic does not have reliable performance data
• It is very important to put down the sizes of the pictures in order to avoid a heap of reflou

Future of CSS

Tab Atkins, slides

What awaits us in the future - scandals, intrigues, investigations from a member of the W3C web development group.

# {$ N} Things You Didn't Know Sass & Compass Could Do

Chris Eppstein

State of sass

Nathan Weizenbaum

2 very interesting talk about SASS and Compass from the founding fathers. Unfortunately, there are no slides, but if you are interested in CSS preprocessors, I definitely advise you to buy the recordings of the third day of the conference.

Beard slap

As some Twittermen noted, the Beard Slap gif was alone worth the money spent on the conference.

Conclusion

Given the rather modest price of tickets, costs can be offset by buying records only for a group of interested developers. There is not much point in looking online - getting answers to questions is quite problematic, and talking to speakers doesn’t work out that way, it’s easier to contact after the event, by mail or twitter.


In some audiences, the conference was followed up to 50 people simultaneously ( from Twitter ).

If there are interesting topics next year, we will most likely just buy records and listen to the reports on the background, while at the same time doing other tasks.

The difference between individual tickets and collective ones could not be accurately determined, after correspondence with the organizers, I concluded that there was no difference in tickets, and the division of price categories was made only on the basis of honesty and the conscience of buyers. Conference recordings in both cases will be available only from one login.

About the conference at Lanyrd .
Tweet archive with hashtag #CssSummit

My next conference is scheduled for October, we’ll go to Fronteers , to Amsterdam, stay tuned, I’ll be able to write a similar report. My previous report on the conference Front Trends 2012 .