HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media

@media is the UK’s biggest web design and development conference, attended by companies and individuals from all over Europe, with sessions led by some of the world’s most respected experts in the field.

Although there are no stated themes, each year there are discernible patterns in the subjects of the sessions which act like a barometer for the prevailing topics in the web climate (terrible analogy, sorry). This year, there were three apparent themes: HTML5 (and the diminishing influence of Flash); user-centred design (UCD); and mobile—or, rather, the web on different devices.

HTML5 has become something of a public discussion point recently, with a great deal of confusion around what it actually means. Strictly defined, it is an updated specification for giving meaning and function to content; but in the public sphere, it seems to mean ‘everything that’s not Flash’. Doug Schepers’ talk on SVG fell under that latter definition, as he provided demonstrations of how this graphics language can be incorporated into web pages to provide visual enrichment with interactivity and semantic meaning.

Patrick Lauke provided an overview of what HTML5 is (and isn’t), and what it’s capable of doing. Later that day, Remy Sharp drilled down into the subject with practical examples of some of the more powerful and flexible APIs that are available to use right now (some of which we already do, on this very website).

Andy Clarke’s keynote speech, Hardboiled Web Design, could also—if we were being generous—fall into the public, stretched definition of HTML5; it was a rallying call to designers to stop catering to lowest common denominator browsers, and start taking advantage of the opportunities provided by more powerful modern user agents, which have built-in graphical features which are mostly catered for by Flash today.

The second theme was the move away from desktop computing and towards consumption on different devices; smartphones, tablet computers, and the like. John Resig provided an exhaustive look at the fragmented range of mobile browsing devices currently available, and warned that we can no longer make assumptions about how content is consumed.

Mark Boulton gave an inspirational talk (and one of my personal highlights) on grid systems and how they need to adapt to the wildly varying devices which the web is viewed on, both now and in the future.

User-centred design was covered from different angles by three speakers. Simon Willison talked about the challenges and rewards of building crowdsourcing applications, using examples from The Guardian’s experiment which got readers involved in making sense of the MPs expense documents which were released to the public.

Sandi Wassmer used architectural examples to instruct us on how to design sites that are inclusive of users of all abilities. Later, iPhone app creator Aral Balkan showed examples of how he makes applications that emotionally engage the user.

There were also a few more technical presentations; Brendan Eich gave us a (perhaps overly-technical for the time of morning) look at the future of JavaScript, whilst Tom Hughes-Croucher (of Yahoo!) gave an overview of the ever more popular Server-side JavaScript (SSJS) frameworks and techniques being used today. They key focus was on node.js and it’s popularity, which is the reason why developers at Yahoo! have been working to get their own YUI library running under node.

To close the conference, Scott Berkun gave an interesting and inspiring look at how persistence is the key to innovation—in his own words: “creativity is a kind of work”—and some practical hacks that we could use to become more innovative ourselves.

And those were just the sessions we attended; the dual tracks of the conference meant we missed four or five others.

It’s an exciting time to be working with the web; there’s a lot of new technology arriving for the geekier amongst us to be playing with, while the move away from the desktop is creating some amazing challenges for designers and some deep thought about how we consume information and interact with (and on) the internet. We’ll certainly be applying what we’ve learned to all of our future web work, and aim to create some really fantastic experiences which exploit all the new possibilities of the web’s teenage years.