We know that UX is an important part of software design. But the high principles associated with UX design can sometimes fall somewhat short of the real-world situations in which designers find themselves. How can you reconcile real-world constraints with the your UX plans? In this talk, Janne Jul Jensen brings a case study from a mobile banking system on which she worked.
We all hate to visit slow Web sites — but what does it mean for a site to be slow? Until we define our terms better, it’ll be hard for us to know where to start fixing things. In this talk, Paul Irish does try to define what it means for a site to be “slow” or “fast,” and then suggests some ways in which we can improve users’ perception of slowness.
The good news: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) makes it possible to style your Web pages however you want. The bad news: Making CSS do what you want can get difficult, especially as your pages get increasingly complex. Lea Verou not only creates a large number of CSS-related tools, but also explains how to use CSS. Over the last few years, she has given talks about “CSS secrets,” things that might not be obvious, even to people who use CSS on a regular basis. In this talk, she describes 10 of these secrets, showing how to use the power of CSS without having to scratch your head too terribly much.
JavaScript is everywhere! It’s in browsers, but also increasingly on servers. In this talk, Kito Mann describes why JavaScript is the only language that does (and will) run in every browser — and thus why it’s the language that we increasingly need to think about. The thing is, thinking about JavaScript doesn’t mean writing in JavaScript; the talk describes several languages built on top of JavaScript, and compares their advantages and disadvantages, as well as why people would use them rather than ES6 (i.e., the new version of JavaScript).
Unicode makes it possible for programmers to work easily (or at least, more easily) with multiple character sets within a single program. Not all developers know how to work with Unicode, and not all developers realize that JavaScript natively supports Unicode. Moreover, not everyone realizes what it means for JavaScript to natively support Unicode. This talk, by front-end developer Mathias Bynens, describes the Uniocde support, but also some of the surprises that JavaScript has for people expecting to use this support.
How can we, as Web developers and designers, ensure that our sites and applications can be used by the largest possible audience? Whether required to by law, encouraged by the prospect of attracting customers, or just because you want to, there are numerous reason to make your Web properties accessible. There are standards for accessibility, but what do those mean, and how can we include them in our work? In this talk, Marcy Sutton introduces the idea of the accessible Web, pointing to the many places in which small changes on our part can make a big difference for many of our potential visitors and customers.
Want to create real-time, peer-to-peer Web applications? You know, as in collaborative drawing programs, or screen-sharing applications, or any other sort of software in which two browsers need to communicate quickly and reliably. In this talk, Chris Wilson introduces WebRTC, a protocol that allows you to do just that. With a relatively small amount of JavaScript, you can write such programs, opening the door to an entirely new class of what we call “Web applications.”
What does “Web security” mean? This lecture, part of a course at MIT, provides an overview of the challenges facing Web applications nowadays. The instructor, James Mickens, talks about a variety of problems, many of which revolve around the complexity of modern browsers. If you didn’t think that the Web was scary before this talk, you will be worried after watching it!
The Web was originally aimed at people using browsers on computers. But the Web isn’t only for people any more, and they’re not only running browsers, and they’re not only using what we think of as computers. Does this mean that browsers are dead? Tim Bray describes the current state of affairs, and considers future trends in the computer industry.
Client-side frameworks — Angular and Ember, for example — are increasingly popular. What does that mean for development, and what hidden traps might there be in these frameworks? Developer and lecturer Sarah Mei introduces the idea of client-side frameworks, and reminds us that not everything about them is necessarily easy to work with, or obvious.