Doors open to all participants at 9am. Arrive early to snaffle some breakfast and grab a great seat.
An introduction to the unique format of Edge, and how you can participate throughout the day.
We’ve see the future, and it’s looking modular. Corporations with large numbers of sites increasingly build complex reusable components, and we’ve seen frameworks emerge to organise these components on a page (e.g. Facebook’s React or FT’s Fruit Machine). At the same time, web standards are evolving to give us a native solution in the form of web components. How do we get there from here? And for smaller organisations and single developers, will there be a market in components? What standard will drive that?
First there was Firebug, now Chrome DevTools, but recently IE’s developer tools have taken a quantum leap forward in version 11, and Mozilla has some unique new features to their built in tools. Tools outside of the browser now integrate far more intelligently, and it’s even possible to use one browser’s devtools to inspect a different browser. Are we still looking for the best tool workflow, or is there room for all these different tools?
Grab a coffee and recharge for the next session.
Everyone has a compile step these days, whether it’s CSS preprocessing, bundling, minification, linting, testing, or optimisation, we all want to make our lives easier by automating build and deploy. But to some, the more complex the build gets, the more we get away from the fundamental motivations for many of the web technologies we love to use. Should we fix this in tooling, or by just making build processes even more sophisticated, or with browser developments like HTTP 2.0 which negate the need for some or all of the build step?
This is a perennial topic but one that is changing rapidly as browsers constantly tweak their behaviour and major advances like HTTP 2 threaten to completely disrupt the received wisdom. Today’s best practices may be tomorrow’s anti patterns. Tools such as WebPageTest and the NavigationTiming API give us more data than we’ve ever had before; how can developers best harness this new wealth of information?
Web UIs are getting better at detecting and optimising for touch, but it continues to be a struggle, with much lower level primitives to work with than in the native world. Should we be aiming to abstract all spacial interaction into a ‘pointer’? How can more complex spacial interactions like gestures and 3D motion be handled without extraordinary amounts of effort?
The web is changing fast. Are accessibility standards keeping pace? What should developers of single page apps do to help users of assistive technologies? How do we anticipate assistive technologies developing in future? To what extent do new web technologies such as canvas and the web audio API either help or hinder those with accessibility needs? How much can we afford to invest in accessibility?
“Responsive” currently seems to mostly mean that your website adapts to a changing viewport width. But there are so many other factors to which web interfaces can respond - time of day, geolocation, battery level, connection speed, viewport height, distance from user to screen, existence and type of pointing device, existence and type of text entry device, pixel density and colour depth of the screen. The list is virtually endless. There’s a compromise to be made, between ease of measurement, cost and impact of being responsive. What are the right factors to invest in for the next few years?
Linda Sandvik, co-founder of CodeClub, explains what CodeClub is doing and how your money is being put to good use.
Exclusively for Edge participants the historic Royal Institution is yours to explore for the evening, with food, drinks and full access to the museum and collections, sponsored by the Financial Times.
The Royal Institution is a very nice 25 minute walk from the conference venue taking in Buckingham Palace on the way, or about 15 minutes by tube.