WWW2006 wrap up

Posted by Roan Lavery

I think I can speak for everyone at Net Resources when I say what a fabulous time we all had at the WWW2006 conference last week. Not only was it a fantastic opportunity to hear about the exciting developments in internet technology and business, but a great chance to network and meet some very interesting people.

Some of the highlights from the week for me personally were:

Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design

David Leip and David Shrimpton lead this excellent all day session on Tuesday which covered contemporary design & development technologies. It covered the current thinking about contemporary Web development, including XHTML, CSS, Javascript and clarifying buzz terms such as AJAX and Web 2.0.

What was so encouraging for me was how so much of what was being presented was already part of our GIC course. In this industry, it’s important that we continuously stay at the forefront of technology and it’s great to see that our students are learning the skills at the cutting edge of web design and development.

XForms for Web Applications

One of the most interesting talks for me, presented by Steve Permerton, gave an introduction to Xforms and their applications.

Essentially Xforms are the replacement for traditional HTML forms, and it’s pretty clear to anyone that uses HTML forms that they are in dire need of some improvement.

Advantages of Xforms include:

• It improves the user experience: XForms has been designed to allow much to be checked by the browser, such as types of fields being filled in, or that one date is later than another. This reduces the need for round trips to the server or for extensive script-based solutions, and improves the user experience by giving immediate feedback to what is being filled in.
• It is accessible: XForms has been designed so that it will work equally well with accessible technologies (for instance for blind users) and with traditional visual browsers.
• It is device independent: The same form can be delivered without change to a traditional browser, a PDA, a mobile phone, a voice browser, and even some more exotic emerging clients such as an Instant Messenger. This greatly eases providing forms to a wide audience, since forms only need to be authored once.
• It is easier to author complicated forms.

In practical terms this means creating forms which self validate on the fly, separate inputs which dynamically integrate with each other and improved system for setting data structure and types.

Steve showed a number of demos during the presentation. One that particularly impressed me was a system of two text fields, where any inputted text was automatically translated into French as each word was typed in.

Much of the functionality could probably be achieved already via Javascript/AJAX functionality, but that’s really not the point. You really shouldn’t have to really on scripting in order to achieve this sort of thing. It should be native to the form system already.

Industries like the Insurance and Mortgage Lenders are already adopting Xforms internally, and although Xforms aren’t yet an established technology, as browser support improves we’ll definitely be seeing a lot more of them.

Style and Layout

This was possibly the talk I was looking forward to most. 3 mini talks all centered around the possibilities and future of CSS.

Bert Bos of the W3C gave us a fantastic look at some of the things that will be possible with CSS3. The system for creating layouts left everyone speechless in terms of it’s sheer simplicity. No more stressing with floats or positioned elements. Simply define the grid structure, in a similar way to tables, then map the divs to the sections of the grid. Genius! It’s a long way off before we’ll be able to use any of this stuff in commercial websites, but the future is looking great.

Andy Clark of All That Malarkey fame and WASP then gave a great little talk on the responsibilities of creating web application, and how the enthusiasm for using the latest hyped technology (IE AJAX) must be tempered with a responsibility to make sure that all the web is accessible to everybody. Andy’s a great speaker, engaging yet blunt with his opinions at the same time, and the talk tackled both the failings of large companies still supporting websites of poor technical quality, and the accessibility organisations and software vendors who are themselves partly to blame for the lack of widespread adoption of accessibility practices.

The final talk was given by Kevin Lawver of AOL, and dealed with writing CSS for syndicated content.. This one kind of jumped in at the deep end so it took me a while to orientate myself on what it was all about, but the talk was fun and full of helpful hints.

After the talks, I was lucky enough to chat with both Andy and Kevin about, amongst other things, the current state of standards based web development in Scotland. And that pretty much wrapped the whole week up for us. We got the stand packed up and made the long trek of 200 yards down the road to HQ.

I’m not sure if we’ll be making Banff next year, but if it’s ever round here again I’d urge anyone to get down to the WWW conference.