Last week I spoke at a Warm Crocodile Conference, a new by Microsoft in Copenhagen, and later the same evening at our CopenhagenJS meetup in Malmo, hosted by FooCafe.
My talk was about how far we are with our web platform - more specifically HTML5. I wanted to give a different talk then the usual "HTML5 buzz talk" that mostly has been about the fancy new features and possibilities we got with HTML5.
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HTML5 in perspective.
In my talk I talked about the evolution we have been though the past years, how the evolution has been driven by WHATWG, and W3C, and how we sometimes has ended up with weird evolution (as Christian Heilmann pointed out in his brilliant talk).
I gave an overview of the current browser landscape, how auto-updating has been introduced to the platform, and few examples on how far we are with actual browser support to highlight the shocking truth: We haven't gotten that far the past many years, mainly because older browsers are holding us back.
IE8 is pollution
More specificly it's older versions of Internet Explorer, especially IE8, the last upgrade-path for Windows XP users. In my talk I had the statement that IE8 is pollution, that holds us back from moving the platform forward. This thought was put in my head by Alex Russel, at last years Fronteers (2012) in Amsterdam, and has slowly grown on me.
In addition I breifly touch the today's browser tooling, and the lack of innovation in it, by showing how little we have innovated since the good days of IE5.5.
Lastly I covered the work that has been going on in the W3C Core Mobile Community Group, how it relates to Facebook, and what it means for the future.
Version2 coverage
My IE8 statement was picked up by one of the biggest IT media's in Denmark, version2, who has written a wonderful article, with an even more brilliant photo of me (very ironic). I hope articles like this can fuel the debate, so we, front-end developers, will unite and do something about IE8.
Many of the subjects in this talk deserves a seperate blog posts, so instead of going into more detail, I've embedded the slides (yup, regular iframe), so go check them out, or find them here <a href="http://auchenberg.github.com/presentations/warmcroc-html5-where-are-we-at/">HTML5 - Where are we at?</a>
<figure class="slides"> <iframe src="http://auchenberg.github.com/presentations/warmcroc-html5-where-are-we-at/"></iframe> </figure>