That Highland Thing

Sir Alan of White, we salute you. The Highland Fling, Scotland’s inaugural web standards conference, took place today in a glorious, sun-drenched Edinburgh. Alas, I missed the first couple of presentations due to a massive reluctance to catch the 6.30am easyJet from Gatwick… funnily enough, the 9:40am seemed far more civilised.

The theme for the day was Progressive Enhancement, certainly a hot topic at Lylo Towers given our new involvement with the frankly marvellous FreeAgent Central (more about that later this month).

Andy Budd, now a seasoned veteran of the web conference circuit, focused on the upcoming features of CSS3 and how we can already take advantage of these using vendor-specific implementations. After years of teaching advanced CSS, one can sense Andy’s frustration with the slow progress of the W3C working groups to sort out the CSS3 spec — never mind the actual browser implementations. It really is a bit of a shambles. The ‘excuses’ (internationalisation, for example) on the W3C’s part are (begrudingly) justifiable, but wouldn’t it be better to see it handed over to a community process (a la Microformats or HTML5) to see faster and more user-collaborative progress?

Christian Heilmann gave an excellent presentation about progressive enhancement using Javascript and AJAX. Christian (currently working for Yahoo! UK) really knows his stuff and his honest, authoritative approach was most welcome.

Christian’s Javascript-centric presentation was a complete contrast to James Edwards‘ — What has AJAX done for us anyway?. Playing Devil’s Advocate to some degree, James entertainingly put forward the case that AJAX isn’t really necessary in most cases, and he made a strong point. I’m always pro keeping things simple (and AJAX is never simple), but then a room full of 100 web geeks were always going to be a tough crowd for this sort of common sense :)

Andy Clarke finished off the presentations with a passionate talk called Beyond progressive enhancement. After the gags (subtle ‘One Step Beyond’ intro and worrying Jeremy Keith prog-rock mock-ups), this was a suitably high-art presentation. Andy is one of the few speakers on ‘the circuit’ these days who really seems to be pushing the boundaries. Not content with sticking to the standard conventions supported by your typical browser, Andy is more concerned with maximising what can be done with the latest and greatest browsers, whilst maintaining an acceptable experience for users of older browsers (i.e. IE). This is leading by example. I’m also loving the fact that he gets clients to sign off a contract stipulating that they have to pay extra for dinosaur browser support. Kudos indeed.

In summary, The Highland Fling was a resounding success, only slightly let down (I guess) by the notable lack of Scottish speakers, although this is something Alan is keen to resolve for next years event. Looking forward to it already…

Posted by Olly on April 5, 2007 at 11:09 pm in highlandfling, highlandfling07, thehighlandfling, thehighlandfling07
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