This Week’s Links: HTML5 Dev Conf Edition

Last week, I attended the HTML5 Dev Conf in San Francisco. Overall the event was quite illuminating; I got a strong sense of where the web development community sees itself, and where it would like to go. This week’s links are to slides of talks I heard, as well as some I couldn’t attend but heard good things about. This is by no means an exhaustive list. (As of this writing, videos of the talks are not yet available; look for them on the HTML5 Dev Conf video page. And we’ll update this post when they’re available.)

Steve Souders: How Fast Are We Going Now

Steve Souders is well known in the web development community for his work on web performance. In his first-day keynote address, he revealed new research â€" including some surprising discoveries â€" on how top sites are implementing performance improvements. For such a well-known figure, Souders is remarkably humble about himself; he also exhibits the infectious curiosity of a scientist. Note that he later self-corrected some of his claims.

Christian Heillmann: Setting Disruptors to Stun!

The video for this one (once it’s available) will be much more enjoyable than the slides. Heillmann’s style was engaging, pointed and witty. As the second day’s keynote speaker, he admonished the crowd not to obsess over the native mobile app space, which has unique constraints and input; instead, he advised re-focusing on the strengths of the web, such as flexibility, reach and connectedness.

Colt McAnlis: A Performance Checklist for the Mobile Web

McAnlis, currently a developer advocate at Google and formerly a game developer, offers specific, detailed tips for improving the performance of your website. I particularly appreciated details, for instance how poorly-considered array manipulation can kill your performance. I always love the flow of “This is what your code looks like, this is how it causes problems, this is how you should write your code, this is what that looks like.” McAnlis also emphasized the urgency of performance for the modern web, especially on mobile; that turned out to be an important theme throughout the conference.

Todd Kloots: pushState to the Future

A straightforward case study of Twitter’s decision to implement the pushState feature of HTML5, and the work they needed to do to support it. For sites that aren’t planning to build a fully operational JavaScript-constructed battle station, Twitter’s findings offer a plausible approach to moving forward. Nice nuts-and-bolts stuff, with no B.S.

Alicia Liu: Slides for Slaying the Dragon: Refactoring CSS for Maintainability

I didn’t actually go to this talk, but it was so popular the first time they ran it, the organizers asked Ms. Liu to reprise it. More practical advice, this time from the CSS perspective.

Domenic Denicola: Client-Side Packages

I have a soft spot for controversial statements delivered fearlessly. You have to be a serious JavaScript nerd to relish the minutiae of an AMD vs. CommonJS takedown. Luckily, I am such a person. Denicola’s arguments were well delivered and, for me, persuasive. If you’re at the point where you want to modularize your JS code base, you owe it to yourself to hear him out.