The opening for this day did Douglas Crockford. He talked about

A Web of Confusion

The Web is like a turducken

For this he proposed the use of a secutiry model that is called object capabilites. Basically this mean that an object can only talk to another object when he has the non-revocable right to communicate with it. The cooperation takes place under mutual suspicion where the object can only obtain such a reference by creation, construction and by introduction. He pleads for a reduction of the DOM API and that the HTML 5 standard should be reset. An example for securing the advertisements he presented his ADsafe which reduces the DOM API for embedded foreign javascript code. It essentially does the same as Caja, but without “performance penalities.”

The Slides can be downloaded.

Then Pete LePage did run down of the

HTML5 Features in IE8

After starting with a lot of self advertising he really said that IE6 should be phased out and that browsers are only good when they are new “like a glass of milk” and should have a best before date. He talked about the DOMStore of IE8, mutual DOM parts and more minor features. Something nice looking stuff he presented was the Expression Web3 Super Preview thing. It allows to render a page with different browsers engines and pictures for comparing them. It doesn’t emulate JavaScritp engine so it is only useful for a static page view of a website but really can be useful.

Glenn Glerum did say in a tweet that was the wrong presentation for the wrong crowd and I think he was right.

The third in line was Jonathan Snook about

The Type We Want

He did a great presentation and mentioned a lot of things and techniques how to get individual fonts into your websites. Topics he covered were the substitution of texts with images, CSS font stacks, sIFR, Cufón, @font-face in different browsers, the typefaces EOT, OTF, TTF, SVG (not really a font but hey..), WOFF. He showed ho to create a bulletproof @font-face, recommended Font Squirrel for this procedure, warned about licensing problems, talked about subsetting, performance of this approach and font embedding systems like TypeKit, Typotheque and Kernest.

His presentation is available at Slideshare. Sites with good font stacks Snook suggested were: unitinteractive.com and SitePoint.

After Lunch Robbert Broersma of xopus.com, who acts for Laurens van den Oever who was sick and therefore couldn’t come, talked about

The challendes and rewards of writing a 100K line JavaScript application

This short presentation was about the WYSIWYG-Editor of xopus. It was mentioned that it consists of 120935 lines of code in 500 scripts and the build their own library that abstracted all browser interactions so the developers do not have to bother about that. They do not use closures because they think that it isn’t handable, they use a own packetmanager, Testframework, TestRunner and CouchDB for storing TestResults.

After that, Thomas Fuchs told us how to

Roll Your Own Effects Framework

He did that three days earlier as he released a 50 line animation framework he called émile after Émile Cohl what the founding of this presentation. He did that because existing frameworks cover to less or to much, have to much plugins you can’t go through and are leading to all the same looking sites. But you can learn from them, pick good parts you need or extend them.

He talk about how normalizing element styles works and why it is essential. He talked about performance issues and that easing is essential for creating a more natural animation and how it can be done. A nice know-how gimmick of this presentation was the use of the ~ operator, that is a bit negation operator that is, if used like var anInt = ~~ aFloat, the fastest way to convert a float to an int.

Then Nicole Sullivan walked about her understanding of

Object Oriented CSS

which is not exactle the same as object orientation in other programming languages. After an introduction on how the cascade in CSS works she talked about how Object Oriented CSS should work and make CSS more powerful and predictable. She recommends YUI’s reset.css for levelling the grounds between all browsers. She says that you shouldn’t reuse duplicate code, reuse elements, avoid location-dependent elements as in #parent .dependent, avoid singletons (#ids) and aboid overly specified classes. One interesting thing she pointed out was, that there is a difference between visual semantics and code semantics, so it is useful to declare for example all headers like this:

1
2

h1, .h1 {...}
h2, .h2 {...}

3

<h2 class="h1">Heading</h2>

Her version of Object Oriented CSS ist also available on github and her slides on SlideShare.

The last bit of the conference did Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith about the

Future of the Web

They did a short roundup about Google’s Closure Tools that I mentioned in my last blogpost. After that they talked about cutting edge technologies, how graphics improved, how fast JavaScript became, Web Workers which bring threading to JavaScript and about mobile devices which “are the future” as the said. And of course the talked about HTML, CSS and Javascript and how it can be used for creating great desktop applications, while using Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR and Appcelerator Titanium as well as using this web technologies to create apps on mobile devices natively on the Palm Pre or using (a tool that I can’t remember, although I know it for quite some time) to create an app out of your web app.

That was a media firework that brought a great and inspiring confrence to a great and inspiring end. For me it is clear to be on the Fronteers 2010.

More Stuff About Fronteers 2009

Jan-Erik Revsbech wrote in his blog a post about how the Fronteers 2009 inspired him. There are more picture available in the flickr album of marvos. There is a transcription of the second day available on Google Wave. If you have no Google Wave invitation yet then talk to me, I have some left.

This was my writeup about the Fronteers, hope you guys find it useful and it gives you all the links and stuff you need to digg deeper in the topics you want to.

The first session was held by Molly E. Holzschlag about the

h3. “State of the Moblie Web”

Molly opened the Fronteers with a talk about what goes on right now and tried to awaken the people in the room with a lot of questions and polls where people can lift their hand so they don’t fall asleep. In one of the polls it seemed that two third of the listeners use the mobile web. She stated that most of the time we are working around issues instead of creating great software.

The mobile web has more constraints then the whole web world, like a more limited typo set, fewer colors, fewer memory in the devied just as fewer bandwidth and battery power. But there are also some advantages like location-based services. This talk was a nice warm up for the day

Then Peter-Paul Koch a.k.a. PPK gave a talk about

“The Mobile Web”

PPK started his talk really at the beginning. Back in 1588 when the spanish armada tried to conquer England. PPK pointed out that they didn’t know how to do a modern naval battle and that the same applies to the mobile development today. Then after giving a good overview about what browsers on mobile phones are out there, he commented about the mobile browsers situation. He said that the browser for Blackberry is dead, mozilla has much to catch up, because they are really late to the game, NetFront just isn’t good and IE is just IE (IE6 to be specific).

He also talked about W3C Widgets as the solution for making it possible to develop applications on mobile devices with tools we already know: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The only thing that is to learn is the config.xml and that can’t be that hard. Weak spot of the widgets approach is, that there is no device API available right now. So it is not possible to use device specific functions like filesystem or geo locations and implementing that is a hard problem.

Then Cristian Heilmann talked

“Of Hamsters, Feature Creatures and Missed Opportunities”

In his talk he first analysed human behaviours of gathering knowledge and stuff and that we solve the same porblem over and over again. Then he revealed what this talk should really be about: YQL. The Yahoo! Query Language is basically a wrapper for a lot of APIs and data gathering stuff like reading out some content of pages you want. You create a SQL-Statement where you can specify what you want Yahoo to get for you and in which form it should be retrieved. It is there so we can focus on remixing stuff to create great new things, because “the web is about Data”.

The slides are also available on his website.

Lunch

That wasn’t the best I have eaten so far, but it did what it was supposed to do: Fill my stomach.

After that Lunch Martin Savelkoul presented a case study at which he showed how it is done:

Building and maintaining a complex frontend codebase

He recommended to split all code into components and even create a component library for code that is used across the boundary of a project. Also he stated that we “want strict seperation of frontend development and the optimization of code release”. With what he means that every code release — for example testing or implementation — needs its own optimizations and that we should use the right buildscripts, documentations and compressions for each release.

One of my favorite talks on the this Fronteers and definitely one of the most inspiring ones (on this day) was Stephan Hay talking about

The Future of Layout

This talk was about CSS and how different layout models can support creating a website using real grids. It is how designers think. He presented in short the three grid layout models out there: CSS3-Grid from Microsoft, Mozilla’s CSS3-Flexbox and the CSS3-Layout by the W3C. Each of them having its own advantages and disadavantages. So making all of them work in all browsers so we can use that one, that is best for the current problem should be the best approach.

In short he also said something about some other CSS3 features. Especially the media queries have great potential in shaping the possibilities of the future (mobile) web.

The slides of this talk are also on his website.

Then it was John Resig’s turn:

Javascript Testing

He stated that testing Javascript is “not the same as Desktop or Server-Side testing”. You have to test not only on different systems, you even have to test in different browsers and browser versions. In a poll he found out that the most used unit testing frameworks for Javascript are (in descending order) QUnit, JSUnit and YUITest.

Besides of talking short about functional testing, server-side testing and distributed testing, he also mentioned a category he called manual testing, what in my opinion is a genious idea (if it would work). Distributing testing instructions to volunteering users who have to test a system and say if it does what was expected. I guess you can say it is some kind of asynchronous remote usability testing.

Of course he get into more detail about the testing frameworks, and especially about his QUnit and TestSwarm. For interesting stuff to this topic are Selenium

The Slides are available on slideshare.

The last session of this day was held by Steve Souders:

Fast by Default

Steve made much advertising for his book. He stated that “fast companies are successful”, so we have much reason to make our sites perform even better. He explained some techniques about how to create a fast website such as progressive enhancement, progressive rendering and how to load scripts that do not block the loading of the content. He also suggests using YSlow and PageSpeed to get a clue what could be improved in loading your website.

Tools you probably should look at for getting “Fast by Default” are the Aptimize Website Accelerator, SproutCore and some feature release of Rails. They will do some of the optimizing Steve speaks and writes about by default so it isn’t hard to get them.

Fotos

An awesome photostream by marvos is available on flickr.

Elsewhere

While many great people are gathered in the Felix Meritis to talk about frontend stuff the google team released their Closure library, including a Compiler that optimizes the code and makes it smaller, a library of various Widgets, utility functions, testing functions, etc. and a templating engine for Javascript that also works in Java.

I will add links to slide, fotos and media about this event to this post when they are available.