Event report: Frontend United 2013

Pronovix was represented by our CEO, Kristof van Tomme, who spoke about Tours in Drupal 8 core and Walkthrough.it. He gave an overview of the current state of the Tour module, its UI in core and contrib, and the plans to get Drupal 8 core UIs documented with tour tips. We also enjoyed the following sessions:

Bruce Lawson - How to destroy the web

Bruce Lawson’s presentation was hilarious, a long-term guide on planning and developing your products. There were no technical guidelines or best practices – all the examples he gave to ensure a future-proof and worldwide accessible web, were bad examples about how not to do it. This way he kept the interest of the audience the whole time, and everybody got the message. How (not) to destroy web: (don't) use flash, (don't) restrict your content for specific countries / browsers / devices, and so on. It’s worth to check out the video of the session!

Responsive Web Design with Sass+Compass by Sam Richard

Sam held a presentation about best practices you could use with sass/compass extensions like breakpoint, singularity grid system and toolkit. He emphasized the importance of proper and organized use of media queries, fluid grids and flexible media. It was also mentioned that one of the things you should avoid is being “Pixel Perfect”, among others like CSS frameworks and Photoshop. You can follow him on twitter: https://twitter.com/snugug

WebComponents by Eric Bidelman

Eric made a great showcase about the less known or rarely used HTML5 tags. He introduced the „SHADOW DOM”, an element in the DOM that stays hidden until it is called by JS. He showed examples of modern web browsers using these elements (for example the
tag actually defines two more divs inside it using the Shadow DOM technique). There are some tags that are already implemented, but also a lot that aren’t, so the usage will change with time as well. You can follow Eric on: http://www.broken-links.com/ Go to the event’s Flickr page to check out collected photos of Frontend United 2013! The "London" graffiti was drawn by Amy Ash.