The Fronteers was indeed a great conference. There were lots of topics that were talked about, lots to take home and lots to think about. I for one have learned a lot and don’t think it has stopped yet. Going over my notes and the ressources I gathered will take some time, but I think it will be worth the time to invest in it.
The second day of the Fronteers didn’t hide behind the first one. There were a lot of speakers who are worth hearing, and that was, what they said: (Well, not of all of it, but some…)

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.