This is the first of at least a few posts on the Highland Fling 2008. The Highland Fling 2008 conference was held in Edinburgh on Saturday. This was the second year of the event, but the first time I’ve had the opportunity to attend. The subject of this year’s conference was “The browser and beyond.” and while this was largely kept to, I guess you had to be looking for it occasionally. I have to thank Alan White and all who helped organise the excellent event, it was an enjoyable experience which I hope to repeat again next year.
Here’s where a personal confession comes in, I actually arrived an hour late as I’d forgotten to change the time on my alarm clock when the clocks went forward. Normally I would’ve found this out long before, but seeing as this was the first week of my study break I hadn’t set my alarm at any point. Some quick footwork was required to minimise any time lost, luckily the event was in an area of Edinburgh I know reasonably well and managed to find pretty quickly. Sadly this delay did mean that I missed Norm’s talk on “The browser and before” which I’d been really looking forward to. My previous experience of Norm at the Yahoo Hackday at Dundee Uni led me to believe he’s an excellent speaker, and all round nice guy, what I caught of his Q & A session confirmed this.
I did however managed to catch Chris Heilmann’s talk “Sharing the joy – building badges for distribution” which again was an excellent talk filled with interesting information. I won’t cover this talk in detail as I’m going to be embedding the slides below, however there are a few things I want to mention as well. The main points of note from Christian’s talk were the ideas of separating data from the traditional page format, making data more readily available for users in a format they appreciate (minimal or no branding), additionally he considered how to achieve this while maintaing good search engine lovin’. There were some fascinating slides on progressive enhancement, in particular only loading badge images if they are visible, only loading a placeholder on page load. This should minimise pointless HTTP requests for badges when they aren’t in the viewport. See the slides below for more detail on his talk.
Next up was Gareth Rushgrove who gave a fascinating talk on being “A First Class Web Citizen.” The talk covered a lot of aspects, but the ones in which I was most interested were URLs and APIs. Gareth stressed the importance of making URLs prod-able, so that if you play around you can easily find yourself at another page of use, without having had to navigate through the page structure. Last.FM is a reasonable example of this, you can prod your way to anybody else’s profile from your own. He also stressed that APIs should be easy to understand and use, and in a theme re-occuring from earlier in the afternoon suggested that APIs should also be seen as another user interface.
Next up, Chris Mills from Opera came to give “The Mobile Perspective.” This was a very interesting talk for me, as I’ve never really considered the mobile market in terms of the internet. It turns out there are a number of things to take advantage of in the area, in particular CSS3 Media Queries to get the width of the browser window and tailor your content accordingly.
This was followed by a fascinating talk on Flash by Aral Balkan. The talk was entitled “Bare-Naked Flash” and did a great deal to convince me of the benefits of Flash. Aside from answering ever question the audience had, before his Q&A session, Aral Balkan did a good deal to dispel the myths surrounding flash, in particular that Flash is 99% bad. This last point included an amusing section of slides involving Jakob Nielsen and a Llama. Still I was enthused enough to consider looking into Flash again in my spare time, in particular the related Flex and Air technologies.
Finally we come to Simon Willison’s excellent talk on Comet. This was either called “Comet: Moving Towards A Real-Time Web” or “Comet: Real developers fight browsers with their bare hands!”. This was an entertaining and informative talk, with the complicated subject matter played for laughs, but covered in enough detail to get you started with Comet if you desire to do so. Essentially Comet is a really cool technology which allows real-time collaboration to happen much more easily. It involves the server pushing out new data to all clients as soon as it becomes available. Additionally there is an epic battle betwen Zepellins and Pterodactyls in which the Pterodactyls emerge victorious (just read the slides).
Overall it was an excellent day, and I certainly intend to attend the event again next year should the opportunity arise. Now, if only I had time to play around with all the new things I learned about. One last thank you has to go to my University which payed for a good deal of the ticket price, I wouldn’t normally have been able to attend, but they made it possible.