Sessions at Fronteers 2011 on Friday 7th October

There's a lot of tension between today's markup and the semantics we're trying to express in our apps. HTML5 adds a few new types to help describe common cases, but what about when there's no allegory in markup for what you're building? What we need now is infrastructure, not guilt about being "non-semantic". This talk explores new standards-track work in WebKit that's going to enable say-what-you-mean development in completely new ways.

Working on websites is no longer a task that requires notepad and a browser to complete. The previous web developer revolution was about the semantics, but now we have real technologies that are being specced out and browsers in a race to implement. Your website is no longer a static page with headings and semantic markup.

With overwhelming array of choices, where do you begin?

In this talk I would like to go through what it takes to get a web development process right, including:

• Web developer tools you should know, including using them to debug remote devices
• Learning efficient CSS with server-side frameworks such as Sass or LESS (mainly Sass)
• Progressively enhancing your site for supporting browsers from the most limited to the most powerful
• Using a version control systel for managing your site (and why Git is awesome)
• Vendor prefixes in your code — when are they appropriate to use?
• Polyfills, when to use what (or even if it’s necessary)
• Tools to help you along the way for all of these.

This talk will go through one very important, and often painful, part of the web. That is, how can end users interact with a web site through forms, and for web developers, how do we develop them in the most efficient manner?

Now that Canvas and SVG are available natively in all major browsers, JavaScript developers have much to learn about creative visual programming.

From particle systems to blending effects, optimised animations, gaming and good old maths creativity, Seb Lee-Delisle (@seb_ly) has more than a trick or two to share with us. If you’re interested in bringing a little visceral beauty to your websites, apps and games, then this is the session for you.

This talk will cover how the jQuery project has worked to provide the best possible experience for its users and has fostered a community around contributing back to the project. We'll look at what the project has done to create this environment and see how it can apply to other projects or companies.

We finally have the ability to serve custom fonts to all popular browsers. However, like everything in our profession, there’s a minefield of gotchas and peculiarities between browsers, devices and operating systems.

Although fonts are a design asset, this talk will be technical. We’ll look at what goes into a font file and how you can get rid of bits you may not need without damaging rendering for particular users.

We’ll investigate common pitfalls in performance made by almost, if not all, font delivery networks. We’ll also discover how the legal fluff surrounding typefaces can be a massive road-blocking joy-void.

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". You show something ordinary and build up anticipation. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. The third act, the hardest part, is "The Prestige". This is when you bring the extraordinary back to the real world. As web developers we nowadays seem to be addicted to magic tricks and we want to see more and more extraordinary things on stage and in blogs and articles to distract us from the mundane day to day jobs we have to do. This is not healthy and it is time to remember what we are here for. We do live in a magical world of development and it is time we start to use it in the real world and change our "best practices" and methodologies of the past to accommodate the needs of today. In this talk Chris Heilmann will show how each and everyone out there can do their part to make us all part of the magic instead of sitting back and consuming the show without learning the tricks.