SuperMondays Lightning Talks – A Review
I was looking forward to the recent SuperMondays lightning talks on April 26th 2011 with some interest, especially the HTML5 topics. Praise and thanks to all those presented, although I have a couple of points for the organisers to improve the session; I think an extra minute or two for each speaker to extend the Q&A to allow for an extra question or two from the audience, and I found the adjudicator calling remaining time a little distracting considering there was a visual cue.
Moving on to the speakers. Here are a couple of reviews on the talks that were useful to me…
I found Ian Oxley’s presentation on HTML5 Form Validation very informative with clear, concise and easy to digest slides. It helped me gain an understanding of the technology, its limitations and fixes for the rusty old browsers such as IE (I was disappointed to see that IE9 doesn’t support this function). His slides can be found on Slideshare and are ideal for an introduction and reference point on the subject.
Alex Kavanagh’s passionate talk on A whirlwind history of copyright and what it means for the 21st century, covering copyrights history from its origins to the present day. It contained many surprises for me and helped clarify a few points on copyright. I did not know that copyright in some countries lasts up to 90 years! And for some that this is not enough with corporations such as Disney pushing for regulations such as the The Mickey Mouse Protection Act to protect their own commercial interests.
Richard Powel gave a concise introduction on HTML5 canvas that was very interesting, showing that with very little code, you can have some cool animation, graphs and effects on your website. No more learning bloomin Flash and ActionScript to achieve the same effect – if the browser supports it…