The inargural event, titled “Emerging Standards”, took place on Saturday 21st February 2008, and was about new and upcoming web technologies. The event was held at One Black Bear’s spanky new offices in Birmingham and featured engaging talks by Matt Machell, Bruce Lawson and Stuart Langridge.
Multipack regular Matt Machell started preceedings with his talk “WAI-ARIA Intro”. The talk was a great introduction to the new ARIA mark-up extension and explained how to make your rich internet applications (web-apps) more accessible.
Matt was followed by Bruce Lawson. Bruce, who has kindly spoken for the Multipack at previous events - noteably Geek in the Park - spoke on his practical experience with HTML5. The talk covered the basics of the new specification, caveats in current browser support and potential solutions. Bruce asked for a call-to-action stating developers should look at the HTML5 specification and give feedback to the working group on anything they see as incorrect or have been overlooked.
The final presentation of the day was given by Stuart Langridge on the topic of some under utilised methods available in JavaScript. As with anything from the days presentations, there are caveats with support in the methods he mentioned but Stuart clearly stated what can be used today and what you should be excited about in the foreseeable future.
The first ever Multipack Presents event was a resounding success. We can not thank the speakers enough for their engaging and informative talks and the guys at One Black Bear for providing the superb venue. We would also like to thank Campaign Monitor who sponsored the event and kept us fed during the interval with some pizza.
“Multipack Presents” will be a series these of formal events featuring differing topics. They will alternate with the more informal meetings on a monthly basis. We already have exciting general ideas for the next couple of Presents events, but we would love to get some feedback what you want to hear at future events.
Come along to out next event, Saturday March 14, 2009 at the Old Joint Stock in Birmingham, from 2pm onwards.