Chris Mills from Opera speaks about HTML5 & CSS3 at MMU
March 9th, 2010
Last Friday I attended Chris Mills’ talk at the Manchester Metropolitan University about HTML5 and CSS3.
Chris’ talk helped me grasp more clearly what HTML5 is going to make available and what it’s going to do for web development.
I got a good idea of the new HTML5 forms and form validation, how local storage is going to work, what <canvas> can be used for and the <video> and <audio> elements. Also, in my recent post about Speak The Web, I mentioned that after Remy Sharp’s talk I was left needing to understand the HTML5 JavaScript API access more clearly. Chris’ talk sorted that out with his use of some pretty good examples. He also demonstrated a way of producing captions for videos (captions currently aren’t supported in HTML5) using the HTML5 ‘data’ attribute, <span>s holding the captions and some nice JavaScript.
He also mentioned a guy from Opera who has created some old Nintendo games using <canvas> and JavaScript. He showed us a really good demo but I can’t get it to work at the mo – supposed to be on nihilogic.dk somewhere.
Ah, one last thing he mentioned about HTML5 after a question from the audience is that you can generally get it to work in older browsers by adding the CSS ‘display: block’ to the elements. That may be in conjunction with something like Modernizr. Again something I need to research!
Chris also covered a load CSS3 properties that I’m not going to list but it was again very useful.
The slides for the presentation are on the Opera Developer Network Blog and can be found here: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/university-talk-resources-march-2010-html5-css3-slides
All-in-all a worthwhile hour and half and I hope Chris is back next year with another free talk.