Had a nice, educational time tonight at the monthly web industry meet
Tonight I went to ‘Second Wednesday‘, the monthly web industry social gathering in Nottingham, held at Broadway Media Centre. We had a talk from lecturer Derek O’Brien about CSS3 and HTML5 and how/when to start using them and inevitable compatibility pitfalls! It was a very good breif overview of the full, verbose extent of these new standards, and was cirtainly interesting fuel for debate.
My feeling is that CSS3 really does have some exciting features we need to get using as soon as possible, and as soon as the bottom end of the userbase (those running old browsers) drops-out. Gradients, shadows and animatiton without script will become so lightweight! The distributers of browsers really need to get heavy handed with those running older browsers, making it very difficult to stay with a deprecated browser.
HTML5, however, I think is more of a hard-sell. I’m not convinced of its value just yet, cirtainly as far as the new XML-style attributes go such as
I think for now, the main benefit will be for SEO and telling the crawler what some content is. Full ubiquity isnt expected until around 2020 apparently anyway (if users of the next decade are anything like those of the last!), but it’ll inevitably become commonplace much sooner by those experimenting with the new features.
A very informative evening, and it was great to be engaged by others who love to talk about these things!