Just in case you missed it the first time I mentioned this event, HTML5 Live is just a couple of days away and I’m getting excited for my presentation. It’s on a topic I love, getting people up and running with emerging standards, it’s in New York and the rest of the lineup is excellent. It should be a great event. If you’re going to be there please make sure to say hi. I’m there just for the event so I’m going to be happy to talk about this stuff as long as there are people willing to listen

Here’s the description:

HTML5 From the Front Lines: What to Embrace Today (and What to Avoid)

As an engineer working on big, consumer sites and applications, Rob Larsen has had hands-on, production experience with pretty much every emerging technology that’s available in a modern browser. In this session Rob will draw on that experience to walk through the current standards landscape and share his take on what technologies are worth using right now and which should be avoided.

This is also the first presentation I’ve done since I moved to Sapient Global Markets, so that’s another exciting wrinkle. For those of you waiting on the post about my new job, I’ll be writing that over the next couple of days.

It’s an exciting opportunity so I want to do it justice when I share it with all of you.

In it, I make a small argument for using HTML5 as a generic marketing term. I’ll be following up on that a little later, here on this blog.

Anyway, check it out. The resources section is worth it alone.

HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies.

Web standard development and marketing

It’s a great time to be a web developer. After a long period of hibernation, the standards bodies and browser vendors have been extremely busy over the past few years, generating a torrent of exciting technology. Developers are greedily seizing on this work, producing demos and full-blown applications at a steady pace. Fed by this activity and further boosted by the growth of their standards-capable mobile browsers, companies like Google and Apple are using these new standards to market their products and services. The wider press is also seizing on this wave and pushing standards hype well beyond the normal circle of web developers and browser vendors.

This volume of discussion has obvious benefits, of course. People getting excited about web standards is a positive development for everyone in the industry. From that perspective, the persistent use of blanket terms, especially HTML5, as a sort of brand shorthand for “emerging web technology” is a useful shortcut. It allows nontechnical people to grasp—in a generalized way—the exciting work being done in the standards space right now.

Interestingly, even the W3C has gotten into the act, using HTML5 and its associated logo (see Figure 1) to publicize the “web platform.”

Read the rest…

We finally launched the new Isobar North America site. It had been in a soft-launch phase for several weeks as we worked out the kinks. Now it’s official.

I worked on it and, amazingly enough for an internal project I’m happy with it.
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I haven’t posted about this yet. I’m an incredible idiot. I’m presenting at the Boston PHP group in October. My presentation is a couple of weeks before Steve Krug. No pressure.

I hope to see you there

Learn CSS (with me)

Is CSS still a mystery to you? Do you find yourself editing your styles over and over justo get them to display correctly in IE and Firefox? Have you created a powerful application, and want it to look nice and clean? Do you want to take your knowledge of CSS and Design to the next level?

In this presentation Rob Larsen will step through the basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS,) the visual language of the Web. Starting with the most fundamental concepts and finishing with concrete examples illustrating common patterns, this presentation will serve as a launching point for those new to CSS and will strengthen the understanding of the core principles for developer or designer more experienced with CSS.

In this event you will learn:

• Basics of CSS
• Design & Layout
• Web Standards
• Rich Visual Behaviors
• CSS1, CSS2, CSS3
• Frameworks, Abstractions, etc.
• Dealing with cross browser support
• Separation of style, content and behavior
• Testing
• Tips & Tricks

If you still fumble with CSS and want to take your experience to the next level, then this event is for you.

About the presenter:
Rob Larsen has more than 11 years of experience building and designing web sites and web applications. Currently he’s a Consultant at Isobar, working for some of the world’s largest brands.

Prior to joining Isobar, Rob was the Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer. At Cramer, Rob and his team produced standards-based, accessible and SEO-friendly sites and rich media applications. Before that, Rob worked for several years as a consultant for clients like Compete, Duracell, Gillette, Boston’s Museum of Science, PC Connection, RSA Security, State Street Corporation and Webex.

I did the conversion last week. As I’ve talked about blogs and HTML5 are so natural the whole conversion probably took no more than 8 hours. Of course, that 8 hours was spread out over a few days. Which is one of the big reasons I didn’t post anything last week. I was busy getting this site moved into the future.

I’ve now got 3 sites running on the shiny new futurespec and I can now say I officially like the new semantic elements. I also feel like I’m getting a good handle on them.
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There’s a lot of content this week, including about 5 hours of video embedded right in the page for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Analytics – The Usability Lab of the new decade

Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path talks up analytics. Don’t I feel like a smart guy with all my fancy analytics experience?

That’s probably something I don’t talk enough about here- analytics. I’ve got a ton of experience with both Omniture and Google Analytics, doing some pretty advanced work. I should share that.

Anyway, good article talking about the UX benefits of analytics data. Check it out.

Short Code resources

This is a little resource page from one of the WordCamp Boston Ingite talks. WordPress Short Codes are clearly awesome and I don’t use them enough. I aim to change that.

I’m actually using them for the table of contents on my ongoing How To Make a Web Site series.
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I thought I’d (gently) toss some links at you:

• I read an Introduction to sessionStorage a couple of weeks ago. I approve.

  As it stands, I’m always storing bits of data in globally accessible places (either in the DOM or in a namespaced Data object,) and I always have to document what I’m doing so having a standard place to park data is great.

  The fact that it stretches across an entire session? I love it. Especially since it’s so straightforward when compared with cookies. I hate dealing with cookies. It feels like coding through a time machine. sessionStorage is much more modern. Convenience FTW.

• Of less interest to me on a practical level was Computing with JavaScript Web Workers. It’s cool, but for the stuff I do? Not immediately useful.

  Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll get some computationally expensive problem and will end up using them next week or something.

• JavaScript is represented strongly on the 30 Most Influential People In Programming list. Care to guess at the JS names included?
• Interested in the ongoing discussion of web fonts (the embeddable, fancy kind?) one of my co-workers, Colin Henson is working on a great series outlining the whole shebang. check out: Web Fonts part 1 and Web Fonts part 2.

  We worked together on the redesign of CramerOnline.com where we used Cufon for headers, so it’s very topical around the office.

  Quick verdict on Cufon, btw? Slightly tricky, but definitely ready for prime time

• While I appreciate all the grassroots efforts to rid the web of Internet Explorer 6, the real way we rid ourselves of that beast lies not with us, as developers, but with IT departments where they control every piece of software on their users machines.

  It’s with that in mind that the good press Windows 7 is getting should be greeted with great joy by web developers the world over. While many IT departments skipped over upgrading to Vista (I know of what I speak, we use XP at work), the lure of Windows 7 might be too much for them to ignore.

  Which would mean IE8 would get a big bump.

  And I would dance a little jig.

The following is a handy list of the things I’m currently thinking about and/or working with as well as a few things that are coming up around the bend. I’ll do this kind of thing from time to time. Mental housekeeping.

One with it.

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