In this second episode of The Web Behind series with Eric Meyer, guest Steven Champeon talks about predecessors to HTML, the webdesign-L online community, the birth of the web standards project, how he coined the term "progressive enhancement" and much more.
Tagged with “progressive enhancement”
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The Web Behind: Steven Champeon
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Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript’s Dark Side
Are we being seduced by the animation and rich UI capabilities of modern browsers at the expense of the underlying platform of the Web?
The Web has entered a new phase in its evolution: The proliferation of a JavaScript enabled audience with increased processing grunt in their devices, better and more ambitious JavaScript developers, and users with an appetite for sophisticated experiences, all seem to be helping to move the web in a rich and exciting direction.
Good developers understand about graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript and the like, so why are we seeing big companies building web offerings with little apparent thought for their impact on the Web?
We’ll explore this by looking at what the Web was, is now, and might become. We’ll look at examples of exciting user interfaces and sophisticated interactions. We’ll also examine some emerging techniques for providing rich user interactions without hurting the web or killing kittens.
Phil Hawksworth, Technical Director, R/GA
Phil began his career building web applications for financial institutions such as Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, and the London Stock Exchange in the late nineties. A focus on web architectures and real-time data delivery lead Phil to a variety of web development roles with particular attention to emerging front-end development techniques and JavaScript application development.
After several years working on web applications and consulting on web best practices at technology companies such as Verisign, VMware and BT, Phil made the move into the agency world where he managed development teams and architected solutions on projects for clients including of eBay, Sony and BP.
Phil Hawksworth is a Technical Director at R/GA and enjoys talking about himself in the third person.
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Excessive Enhancement — Are We Taking Proper Care of the Web?
We all love to see exciting and innovative "interface shizzle" driven by JavaScript and the ever increasing rendering capabilities of modern browsers, but are we getting these at the expense of the Web? This talk will explore the good, the bad, and the fugly of rich interfaces, while examining how and why we should take care not to damage the Web.
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Elliot Jay Stocks – Progressive enhancement
In the summer of ‘07 in a flood-soaked Oxford, England, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His presentation, ‘Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation’, looked at how to reward modern browsers with the latest CSS tricks and punish IE by dropping certain site features. Over two years later, what has changed? We’re starting to see the ideology of progressive enhancement — especially with CSS3 — spread throughout the web design community, but more work needs to be done.
What can we do to spread the message further and design a better-looking web faster? Elliot will look at how features of the CSS2.1 and CSS3 specs can enhance your websites and he’ll examine the implication of using such techniques. He’ll look at the issues surrounding font embedding and the recent development of the font-as-service; the arguments about browser support; the potentially controversial irrelevance of validation; and how we can attempt to reach the future sooner by writing forward-thinking code. In this motivational presentation Elliot will urge you to embrace the techniques of modern web design and to stop worrying about the so-called restraints.