Ajax Experience 2009 … Day 3

The third and final day of the conference had a couple of highlights for me.

SpritMe – Steve Sounders

Steve sounders gave a quick presentation on his SpriteMe tool, which was really cool. SpriteMe basically takes a look at an entire web page and figures out the best way to reorganize images that doesn’t sacrifice page layout, but decreases the number of http requests it takes to load a web page (thus decreasing page load time). Since I can’t do this presentation justice you’ll just have to check out the spriteme link: http://spriteme.org

Phone Gab – Brian Leroux

This presentation started by explaining the problems with mobile phone development (behind the times, several mobile platforms … iPhone, Palm Pre, Android, etc.) and how PhoneGap can help solve these problems. Presenter went into some detail presenting the highlights and relative low-lights of PhoneGap.

The highlights included that PhoneGap is open source, can handle mobile development on multiple platforms, and every app can be written in html, css and javascript while still taking advantage of each platforms strengths. The low-lights being lack of testing and documentation, which were mostly due to the developers not thinking the concept with work and thus didn’t bother. To check out their site for more information on PhoneGap: http://www.phonegap.com/

ARIA: Pushing Accessibility Even Further – Joe McCann

ADA is the least you can do. But really not that great for Ajax applications. WAI-ARIA spec is the top of the mountain. Most screen readers can handle this format.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications – addresses the accessibility of dynamic Web content for people with disabilities. This is a newer W3C standard for supporting web accessibility.

WAI-ARIA: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/ajaxexperience2009/joe-mc-cann-tae-aria-presentation

Progressive Enhancement

All the presenters that dealt with any JavaScript or front end enhancements consistently talked about Progressive Enhancement. It’s a pretty interesting topic that I haven’t been incorporating in my development up until this point. In fact, I didn’t even know much about it until this conference. So I pulled the following link, which I thought gave a good explanation. I’m totally on the Progressive Enhancement boat. I love the concept of producing HTML as dumb as possible then use CSS and JavaScript to add functionality based on browser functions rather then user-agent.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingprogressiveenhancement