It might not be win­ter yet, but it was plenty cold when I arrived bright and early at Kraków’s Park Inn Hotel for day one of the very first Front Row web con­fer­ence — in fact, I was one of the very first peo­ple there. I grabbed a lan­yard and a funky red t-shirt — take note, other con­fer­ences, they had women’s styles in three dif­fer­ent sizes — and  watched the atten­dees trickle in.

Being a sin­gle track con­fer­ence meant that I could sit down, relax and pay atten­tion to the pre­sen­ta­tions with­out hav­ing to make hard deci­sions or con­stantly worry that I might be get­ting more value from the con­cur­rent ses­sion. While it’s obvi­ously not suit­able for large events that need to cater to more var­ied inter­ests and skill lev­els, I actu­ally enjoyed the change.

Open­ing keynote: Patrick H. Lauke -  The Once and Future Web

The first speaker of the day was Opera’s Patrick H. Lauke, with The Once and Future Web. Patrick’s pre­sen­ta­tion fol­lowed the devel­op­ment of the mod­ern web from it’s hum­ble begin­nings with text-only browsers, then Mosaic with the addi­tion of images (quote: “where it all went wrong”), through (ab)uses  of Java, Flash, table-based lay­outs, and crazy CSS hacks — with the recur­ring theme being the con­flict between what the tech­nol­ogy allows and what design­ers want to do, illus­trated per­fectly by the clas­sic William Gib­son line  from Neu­ro­mancer, “the street finds its own uses for things”.

Patrick’s pre­sen­ta­tion gave kudos to the main in the blue hat, “The Big J-Zed” (Jef­frey Zeld­man) and his essen­tial con­tri­bu­tion to the mod­ern web, Design­ing With Web Stan­dards, and also John Allsopp’s A List Apart arti­cle from 2000, A Dao of Web Design. Inter­est­ingly, when I was going back through old posts on this blog, I found a link to an anti-CSS-layout web site that is still being updated with fresh argu­ments and exam­ples in 2011! I first linked to it in dis­be­liefover 6 years ago. Talk about liv­ing in the past and not let­ting go — it reminds me of the fol­low­ing quote from my favourite movie of all time:

The Big Lebowski: Your rev­o­lu­tion is over, Mr Lebowski! Con­do­lences! The bums lost!

Patrick posits that the web thrives on hacks, and char­ac­ter­ized tech­nolo­gies like JQuery and Sass as “mas­sive hacks”. This may seem exces­sive, but when you think about it, it’s true — these have been devel­oped to bridge the gap between what mod­ern browsers are capa­ble of deliv­er­ing and what design­ers and devel­op­ers want to achieve.

Patrick talked through HTML5 (and asso­ci­ated tech­nolo­gies) and the amaz­ing things that are now pos­si­ble, but urged design­ers and devel­op­ers — who will “always be look­ing for the next shiny thing” — to use but not abuse them. While we can now use the lat­est and great­est in our every day work, Patrick warns against think­ing that you only need to sup­port the very lat­est browsers, as throw­ing out years of best prac­tises, pro­gres­sive enhance­ment, and grace­ful degra­da­tion is short sighted.

The web is in con­stant beta — and John Allsopp’s Dao is as rel­e­vant as ever. Patrick left us with one last thought: “Now are the good old days of tomorrow”.

Wojtek Zając — Top mis­takes in web accessibility

Wojtek Zając has the aura of an expert still butting up against the frus­tra­tion of man­agers, clients, design­ers and devel­op­ers who just don’t “get it” when it comes to acces­si­bil­ity. In the later ‘Open Space’ ses­sion on the topic, he said that Poland is only just now get­ting anti-discrimination laws that will include web site acces­si­bil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions — so it’s not sur­pris­ing that he’s still encoun­ter­ing the kinds of atti­tudes that were wide­spread in the US, UK and Aus­tralia five years ago.

As such, Wojtek’s pre­sen­ta­tion Top Mis­takes in Web Acces­si­bil­ity was a brief but focused overview of why acces­si­bil­ity is impor­tant, the kinds of bad atti­tudes to access issues that are com­mon­place, and a list of com­mon mis­takes that devel­op­ers are making.

Marek Stępień — Har­mony – The Shape of Things to Come

This pre­sen­ta­tion cov­ered what’s com­ing in the next ver­sion of ECMA script — ES.next. Marek Stępień cov­ered the topic admirably but to be bru­tally hon­est this kind of advanced JavaScript is over my head. If you’re into that kind of thing how­ever, check out Marek’s slides — there’s lots of code exam­ples that I’m sure will get hard-core JavaScript nerds drooling.

Michał Budzyński — HTML5 as a Gam­ing Con­sole. Is it possible?

The answer to this very enter­tain­ing ses­sion title was most def­i­nitely yes accord­ing to Michał Budzyński, cre­ator of CSS Nyan Cat. Let that sink in for a moment — I saw the cre­ator of CSS Nyan Cat in per­son! You don’t get much more internet-famous than that.

Again, as I’m not a JavaScript devel­oper nor do I ever intend to be, I took less away from this pre­sen­ta­tion then some oth­ers. The gen­eral idea was that the num­ber of HTML5 games is increas­ing, and while there’s a long time to go until HTML5-powered games out­num­ber Flash games, but the advan­tages of a pure HTML5/CSS/JavaScript solu­tion means that day will def­i­nitely come. Michał was a lot of fun as a pre­sen­ter — at one point, when show­ing off CSS Nyan Cat, he noted that the mouth was a rotated let­ter E — and I looked around to see half the audi­ence tilt­ing their heads to confirm.

Unfor­tu­nately the slides for this pre­sen­ta­tion aren’t avail­able online but they may appear on Slideshare in future.

Richard Carter — CMS/Design Inte­gra­tion — or Pat­terns in Theming

Richard Carter defines them­ing as markup (HTML), plus style (CSS), plus soft­ware (Dru­pal, Word­Press etc) — plus swear­ing. i think that’s a sen­ti­ment any­one who does any them­ing can attest is very accurate.

Rchard’s rec­om­mended approach (where the soft­ware allows) is to use a base or starter theme, then cre­ate a child theme to over­ride just the parts that are required. He cited exam­ples from Magento, Joomla, Dru­pal, Word­Press, Medi­aWiki and ModX — this guy really knows his con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems (he’s also writ­ten books on Joomla, Mag­nto and Medi­aWiki). The child theme model rep­re­sents a trade-off between con­ve­nience and over­head — a trade­off that Richard believes is strongly weighted on the con­ve­nience side in most cases.

This was a topic I have a lot of expe­ri­ence with, and I com­pletely agree with Richard’s asser­tion that ide­ally, theme files should  not need com­pli­cated logic in order to dis­play con­tent — using the Word­Press title code block as an exam­ple of code that is too com­pli­cated. On the other hand, it’s pos­si­ble to abstract code too far — as an exam­ple, Richard cited Joomla which hides the entire head sec­tion in one out­put state­ment. Get­ting the right bal­ance between choice and gran­u­lar con­trol is tough, and Richard admits he doesn’t have the ulti­mate answer.

My quote of the day goes to Richard for sum­maris­ing the CMS prob­lem as “WYSIWTF?”, as any­one who has ever cleaned up con­tent imported from Microsoft Word will iden­tify with.

Zef Hemel — JavaScript in the cloud with Cloud9 IDE

Zef Hemel’s pre­sen­ta­tion on the Cloud9 IDE was a bit of an eye-opener as to just how sophis­ti­cated a JavaScript-driven appli­ca­tion can be. Zef started off by ask­ing why we are not devel­op­ing web appli­ca­tions IN a web appli­ca­tion — he thinks it makes sense to “use what you evan­ge­lize” and “code on the web”.

The Cloud9 IDE is com­pletely cloud based, writ­ten in JavaScript on both the front end and the back (using node.js) — although Zef stated that around 80% of the code is client-side. The live demon­stra­tion of the ease of access, ease of setup and ease of col­lab­o­ra­tion was very impressive.

Although the slides do not appear to be online any­where, you can check out the prod­uct itself at Cloud9.

Open Space sessions

After lunch, the del­e­gates gath­ered around some pin-up boards and the con­cept of Open Space ses­sions was intro­duced. These were “uncon­fer­ence” or “birds of a feather” style ses­sions, casual col­lab­o­ra­tion or dis­cus­sion ses­sions in the six break­out rooms, con­ceived and led by audi­ence members.

I par­tic­i­pated in three ses­sions — an acces­si­bil­ity dis­cus­sion, another ses­sion on con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem them­ing, and one I sug­gested on inter­est­ing uses of Word­Press — all of which were quite inter­est­ing and per­haps a good way to get re-energised after lunch.

Four more ses­sions are sched­uled for day two in the same timeslot.

Rich Quick — Topsy Turvy Design

Rich Quick’sstan­dard joke seems to be “yes, that is my real name” and he flashed around his pass­port to prove that it is in fact true. His pre­sen­ta­tion was about adap­tive or respon­sive web design (he claims the ter­mi­nol­ogy you use will depend on which book you read first).

Rich ran through the tra­di­tional web design process and noted that it was sim­i­lar to the tra­di­tional print design process. He then sug­gested that respon­sive or adap­tive web design should instead be done by work­ing from the inside out — first the largest screen res­o­lu­tion, then what the same design would look like if the screen it was viewed on was a bit smaller (tablet or net­book sized) and finally if the screen was even smaller (mobile screen).

How­ever, when cod­ing, the process is reversed: start with the small­est lay­out, then add fea­tures for mid-sized and then full-sized screens. Basi­cally — grace­fully degrade your design, and pro­gres­sively enhance your code.

Adap­tive design is really easy, accord­ing to this pre­sen­ta­tion — it really just boils down to one line of code before each of the sets of dif­fer­ent CSS. Although ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer below 8 don’t sup­port @media queries, it’s pos­si­ble to get sup­port with con­di­tional com­ments or a library such as Mod­ern­izr, respond.js, etc.

To get started, Rich sug­gests that like a lit­tle bit of CSS is bet­ter than none, a lit­tle bit of respon­sive­ness is bet­ter than none, so it’s pos­si­ble to add some basic media queries to han­dle basic lay­out on almost any site with just a few addi­tional statements.

Chris­t­ian Heil­mann — Fail, Meh or Win? How do you want the web to be?

Mozilla’s Chris­t­ian Heil­mann closed out the day with an keynote designed to enthuse and inspire atten­dees. To start with he admit­ted that with his hec­tic con­fer­ence sched­ule of the last week, the pre­sen­ta­tion was writ­ten on the plane that morn­ing, but I think that a speaker as dynamic and expe­ri­enced as Chris­t­ian could almost have winged it with no prepa­ra­tion at all.

Christian’s pre­sen­ta­tion was all about atti­tude — he started off by stat­ing “we have fun being web devel­op­ers” which is most def­i­nitely true! He talked about how he got into his cur­rent posi­tion — by being him­self, always play­ing with tech­nol­ogy, always ques­tion­ing what he was told, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the com­mu­nity. He urged devel­op­ers to chal­lenge them­selves — because the only con­stant is change.

Under the head­ing “rea­sons to be cheer­ful” Chris­t­ian talked about some of the cool things about being a devel­oper, includ­ing things that are often con­sid­ered bad things — notably, that as there’s no offi­cial accred­i­ta­tion and because many peo­ple don’t really even know what a web devel­oper does, devel­op­ers are judged by what they’ve done, not what let­ters they have behind their name.

The pre­sen­ta­tion was long and moved quickly, and after a while I stopped tak­ing notes and started just try­ing to keep up with the ideas that Chris­t­ian was fir­ing off. The main take­away was that devel­op­ers need to engage — play with the lat­est tools and code, par­tic­i­pate in the com­mu­nity, give feed­back. Every­one has the poten­tial to be a web rock star.

At the end of the day…

The main thing I learnt today is that Poland has a lot of web tal­ent — I’m impressed! Day two report com­ing up.