Web Standards Days - Riga

Short review

I would like to start by saying that everything was carried out at a level and quite smoothly. Topics were relevant, the information presented was relevant, and the speakers were interesting and even humorous. Technically, everything was also great - the conference room had not yet turned a month, so it is equipped with the latest fashion: two screens, one in front and one in the side, evenly spaced speakers in the room, wireless consoles, microphones, and other buns like WiFi and air conditioning . There were no problems with drinking and snacks either, the hotel staff constantly replenished the table at the end of the audience with tea, coffee, lemonade and cookies.

The schedule of lectures was well worked out and there was enough time for everything, almost as scheduled. Introduction, three reports for 30-45 minutes at the beginning of the day, with breaks for 15 minutes, a delicious lunch from your own wallet, after three more lectures, and at the very end, the lecturers gave a small holivarchik for a third of an hour.

Review in detail

As follows from the above-mentioned daily routine, first we were told where we were, then we held exactly six lectures, and at the end a little light. Below, I will decompose all this into time and other shelves.

11:00 - Nikita Seletsky

Opening

Nikita Seletsky, head / teacher of the “School of Web Technologies”, welcomed everyone to the conference, spoke about the idea of ​​the conference (although its name is quite enough for understanding), introduced himself and the others who had to be introduced, and wished everyone a pleasant day.
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11:15 - Nikita Seletsky

Web layout in Latvia: Yesterday. Today! Tomorrow?

From the introduction Seletsky smoothly proceeded to the presentation of his report. He told a little uncertainly, but this did not spoil the impression of the action. The content was statistical in nature. Charts were presented on the use of certain DOCTYPE, on the observance of standards, on the presence of HTML5 and on similar things. Statistics were collected from the sites of the conference participants, and when data on the percentage of valid pages were submitted, a drop in their eyes was observed. This story was more introductory than informative. All the most interesting follows further, no offense to Seletsky.

12:00 - Dmitry Dulepov

Features of creating web sites for mobile devices

Dmitry Dulepov, a pioneer of web development in Latvia, spoke about problems and solutions when developing websites for gadgets. At first, the speaker of all was reassured by the fact that the main use of the mobile Internet from smartphones on a tyk-based basis, thanks to which browsers that are worth bothering with, are reduced to mobile versions of Opera, Safari and Chrome. They, in turn, are the liveliest of living clients, and have almost the same capabilities as the desktop counterparts. Therefore, the HTML part can be implemented without difficulty. Mobile browsers exclude flash and others like it, as well as require a finger-oriented interface. And a number of frameworks, which were thoroughly analyzed by the lecturer, come to our aid: iWebKit, WebApp.Net, SproutCore. He also started talking about Gianduia, but he didn’t say anything more than the name. It turned out very apple, everything was twisted around the iPad and iPhone. By the way, it seems five of the six lecturers presented with MacBooks.

13:15 - Anton Nemtsev

HTML5 and CSS3. The evolution of web standards

Anton Nemtsev, a freelancer with more than ten years of experience, told everyone in detail about the goodies that are waiting for us in the web standards of the present-future. This, perhaps, was one of the most informative presentations. He told us step by step how big a step forward HTML5 is, why it’s more e- resolution than revolution, what’s left or gone from previous versions and what’s new, what DOCTYPE has become (and it has become <- DOCTYPE HTML>) and so on . And also in the second part, the Germans dreamed a bit about web standards of a more distant future (for example, the presentation of placing data on a page with regular CSS, or a simple declaration of the behavior of divs relative to each other, and so on), some of which are already somewhere implemented (usually in Safari). In the third part, the main innovations of CSS3 and potential problems with them were revealed. Everything was accompanied by a demonstration of the work of already existing components, such as additional types of forms or animation. It turned out quite informative and new.

14:00 - All All All

Food. Finding a place to eat well

All Everyone Everything, the participants of the conference and not only, went around Riga in search of a suitable restaurant or McDuck. I was lucky, I was local, I ate it right. I can’t vouch for the rest, but it seems everyone’s back came happy.

15:00 - Vadim Makeev

CSS management. Three years later

Vadim Makeev, a web evangelist at Opera Software, began the presentation by calling the development and management of CSS the most capacious part of any serious project, and spoke about how to reduce the volume of this titanic work. The whole story was based on the experience of creating the style part of yandex.ru, so there were no questions about the relevance of the proposed problems and the correctness of the solutions. The first thing Vadim told us about is the modularity of the .css files. It is very good when only everything necessary is attached to the page - the load on the server and the client is reduced. It is even better to create at the development stage automatic splice of CSS into separate files, so as not to lose on latency when requesting each module separately. It was also about the fact that it is impossible to put a browser definition and the use of hacks on the shoulders of the server, it may be wrong, as well as about the definition of these hacks themselves and about their correct inclusion in the final file. It was a couple of words about good CSS style markup - lookup for the closing curly brace, the tree of elements (by parent), about markup by the comments of code departments. The usefulness of resetting some properties of standard HTML tags and the need to sort the contents of a CSS file according to certain criteria (order of appearance on the page, example of the author ) was explained. It was presented very smoothly and clearly.

16:00 - Mikhail Baranov

Developer Tools - Which Is Tastier?

Mikhail Baranov, the author of the courses on web development at the Faculty of Retraining SPbSPU specialists, decided to talk about tools for sorting out HTML + CSS + JavaScript for good. The first slide was marked by the number 1996, by which the author meant 2006 - the year of the release of the FireBug. With him came peace and tranquility in the previously chaotic and terrible light of debugging and parsing client applications. This report was full of fairly obvious things for any typewriter and JavaScript programmer, however, he arranged the possibilities of these tools and highlighted the special moments in each of them. Were mentioned ColorZilla, YSlow, IE Developer Toolbar, as well as native stuff in some browsers, like DragonFly from Opera, or noname from new IE and Chrome.

17:00 - Maxim Birch

Lean Startup. From idea to million

Maxim Bereza, a web developer from Latvia with his startup, came to the conference to share his experience in creating his own project. Maxim talked well, but somehow too blurry. Nobody understood how much he earned and how much he invested, what exactly a startup represents, except for the fact that it is a social network with some applications, and for how long have they been doing it. However, he introduced us to the technical part of the project - what frameworks were used (Django, jQuery), what is on the server, what principles did they keep to create (most importantly, the ease of use as close to utopia), where they keep the code (on the SVN server), saving traffic (compression of scripts and HTML), as well as the start-up Bible - “Getting Real”.

17:40 - Almost All Speakers

Round table “Web standards vs. Rich Internet Applications

Almost All Speakers, except for Mikhail Baranov, who joined later, slowly and calmly dug up the ax of the holivar. It was no longer about the abstract Rich Internet Applications, but about the Flash - their eminent representative. There were no obvious supporters of the flash, however there were those who were shaking the rest of the convictions about this technology. A rather non-coercive situation has emerged and everyone amicably discussed the pros and cons of the flash, to whom he annoyed and what, and what the poor shine for him in the future (and he, as it turned out, still shines). A good ending, frankly, well laughed.

Instead of ending

The event is great. Maybe someone here will not find something new for themselves, but in any case this is a great reason to have a good time among nice and interesting people. During lunch I met two local students, learned a lot of interesting things and even planned to cooperate with them on a certain project. So here. All the best!

PS All interesting links to presentation materials and photos from the conference are at the end of this topic.