cssday 2016 Day 1: Html special.

So I’m in Amsterdam to attend the cssday conf. I won’t focus on the awesome crew and organisators here but like to share a few of my thoughts about the contents of the presentation.

on the way to the venue

Jeremy Keith started the conference with a blasting history lesson about the <a> tag. What was crucial for me in that talk was the following statement:

Data has to be turned into information and information has to be turned into knowledge.

And this can only happen when we connect the data and that can only happen using links. Further he talked about the TCP/IP protocol and that it was designed to be “dumb”. But that “dumbness” was so powerful that it actually allowed people to create more complex and powerful things on top of it like email, ftp or even http. The second crucial thing for me he than said was:

Http succeeded because it was simple but powerful

Yoav Weiss than talked about the <link> element and how powerful it is and that there are actually awesome features out there right now for preloading and async loading.

My website is just 3 headlines and 2 links and a custom font. During the talk (I know I should’ve listened) I managed to apply a really quick implementation of something he talked about which was resulted in super awesome moment for me.

Here is the commit in github

use a proper preload font loading mechanism that @yoavweiss just talk... · lassediercks…

What happened is: people started to give me reviews! Oh my god how I love the internet and it’s low barriers for collaboration.

What I did wrong was preload the fallback(lol!) but it’s okay I fixed it in the next talk :P

(Props to https://twitter.com/gaelmetais and https://github.com/nhoizey)

The next talk was https://twitter.com/ppk giving us yet another history lesson about browsers and how developers reacted to that circumstances. He did cause a little controversy by saying something like this:

Unfortunately out of context that sounds really harsh. What he wanted to say is: tools are tools. Tools are build for a purpose. You don’t need a chain saw to put a nail into the wall. Know why you use tools and libraries in web-development and if you can afford it, here and than try it without tools to know why you are actually need them.

here are the slides

https://twitter.com/zcorpan digged really deep into the <source> element. I’ll not repeat it here. It was detailed!

https://twitter.com/rakaz had a charming style of explaining the html tokenizer and that html is bulletproof and one of the only software that throws no errors but get’s along somehow.

Monica Dinculescu about the input

https://twitter.com/notwaldorf gave us yet another history lesson about the <input> and it was stunning also she works at polymer and has a crush on emojis and ended her Q&A with the following statement:

I like the avocado emojii, I think we should answer more questions with it

(that’s not exactly what she said but as far as I remember it)

https://twitter.com/kuvos explained what the <iframe> can do

and then..

Lea Verou with her live-coding presentation setup

Lea Verou. For me, she is on of the most amazing speakers ever. She focused on html secrets. Stuff that we can do today but that’s not fully supported but can be polyfilled. Did you know that you can natively validate an input? HOW AWESOME IS THAT! or did you know the <datalist> or the <dialog>? Daamn that will be useful.

What did impress me that she was live-coding all the time.

But the most important thing she said was in the Q&A after the talk

There is so much out there which is supported natively today or/and can be polyfilled but no ones starts to searches for a native solution when he knows how to do it with this hacks and workarounds.

And this is why I even wanted to write about this day. This sums it up perfectly. How do I know that there is a better solution out there of what I’m currently doing? It feels for me like we’re so focussed on our business goals and product features that we can’t see anymore that simplicity wins. Always. What Jerermy said: It’s better to have something simple but powerful that helps people achieve greater thing than to create something complex from the get-go.

To put it in one-liners what the day had taught me was:

Don’t outsmart yourself.

Use tools to achieve something not because tools are cool.

For almost everything on the web there is someone who knows a lot about it

and in the end:

We are a huge community, we are the creators or the web. If we work together we can teach each others what we know and learn about what we don’t know yet.

that said, thanks for everyone on stage and I’m super thrilled for tomorrow.

I’ll probably tweet about it anyway so give me a follow if you’re interested

Lasse Diercks (@lassediercks) | Twitter

Thanks for reading ❤