The Graphical Web 2014: Setting Sail for a Journey in Web Graphics
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Graphical Web Conference in Winchester, U.K. Find out about my experience!
A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending The Graphical Web conference.
The Graphical Web is an annual gathering of web developers, browser makers, data journalists, academics, and web-standards creators. It provides an forum for this diverse group of people to network and learn more about the latest web graphics technologies. The technologies that the conference focuses on are SVG and WebGL. This year’s edition was held in Winchester, United Kingdom, a small, classic English town a few hours outside of London. The event was hosted at the University of Winchester campus, which served as the perfect backdrop for the week’s festivities.
The conference spanned 3.5 days, with the first 2.5 days consisting of talks and the remaining time left for workshops.
Due do some last minute schedule changes, I was fortunate enough to snag a speaking spot on the first day and presented about the work I did using Document Fragments and Object Pools to boost the performance of the Templates feature in Social Tables. Templates are a way for user to quickly create a large number of tables in a given region. Check out my slides here if you want to find out more!
Many of the use cases for SVG presented throughout the conference were data-visualizations created using D3.js. Those who attended my talk told me how they found it refreshing to see a different use case for SVG such as Social Tables. It was also my first time presenting at a professional conference, which was an incredible experience I will never forget!
The rest of the talks varied from product demos to more R&D focused projects. I cannot possibly dive into all of them here, but my two favorites were Animations on Fire by Brian Birtles and SVG 2 for the Artist and Developer by Tavmjong Bah.
Brian focused his talk on tuning and optimizing the performance of CSS3 transforms, transitions, and animations. I learned how animating position changes using transforms is much more performant than using positional properties like top, left, and margin, which cause browser reflow. He also talked about the the CSS property will-change, which basically gives an element its own layer to perform an animation whenever one is applied to it.
Tavmjong, who is a member of the W3C, gave an overview of some of the new features coming in SVG 2. Among the many features he mentioned, the ones that stuck out to me in particular were the auto-line wrapping text (which is currently a HUGE pain to do in SVG) and flexible stroke position (where stroke can be defined to be either only inside or on the borders of a shape).
On the second day of the conference, there was a speakers panel made up of engineers from major browser vendors like Chrome, Firefox, and IE, and various members of the W3C. I was just in awe of this collection of individuals…these are the people that literally control the Internet, and here they were fielding questions and asking for suggestions on how to make the web experience better for everyone. I was impressed with their vast knowledge and humble attitudes, and it was truly a surreal moment to witness such a distinguished group of individuals.
At the conclusion of the second day of talks, we were all taken to the nearby town of Portsmouth for a tour of the harbor, where a number of old warships from different generations of the British Navy are housed. After the harbor tour, we boarded an old warship called the HMS Warrior, where we had a brief happy hour. Being onboard an old ship like that was just an awesome experience! I felt like I was in a scene straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean.
After happy hour, we were led inside the ship for dinner, where we were greeted with the following setup:
Yes, those are cannons in between the dinner tables! How unreal is that?!? And the food was delicious as well!
The last few days of the conference were spent on the workshops. I sat in on a workshop teaching the basics about WebGL, where we built a model of the Earth with a moon rotating around it. I thought building something like that would end up being somewhat complex, but it actually ended up being relatively straightforward with not a lot of code! We have a WebGL component to our product here at Social Tables, and though I do not get many opportunities to work directly with it, it was still good to gain further exposure to the realm of 3D programming.
Overall, my experience at The Graphical Web was truly amazing and one that will resonate with me forever. Thanks again to Alan Smith, the Office for National Statistics, W3C, and the rest of the conference organizers for throwing a perfect event!
