Last Saturday brought about the inaugural Multipack Presents event kindly hosted at the One Black Bear offices. The theme of this first event was “Emerging Standards” — Matt Machell, Bruce Lawson and Stuart Langridge discussed ARIA, HTML 5 and Whizzy Javacsript Stuff respectively.
The event kicked off at The Old Crown pub where most of the attendee’s met up, it was good to see some new faces along with the regular peeps — about 25 people turned up, which was better than we expected considering this was our first event. After some liquid refreshment we headed over to the One Black Bear offices where the talks began. At this point I have to state that Gaz and Ross have the nicest working environment I have ever seen, very jealous!
Matt started the presentations, his talk was a good introduction to the new ARIA specification and explained how to make rich internet applications more accessible. The presentation raised some good debate, Stuart came up with a nice idea about creating an ‘aria stylesheet’ without altering existing markup, which he quickly knocked up the next day.
Bruce’s talk followed, discussing HTML 5 and talked through the process of his HTML 5 redesign, explaining certain new tags that are being proposed. Maybe I’m mistaken, but one thing that I found odd with the specification is that there isn’t a tag that describes the actual main content for the page, there are tags for <nav>, <footer> etc but nothing to describe the actual content. There is <section> but there can be multiple instances of <section>. I think there should be a unique tag to describe this, Bruce has asked for developers to give feedback to the working group on anything they see as incorrect or has been overlooked so I may just send some feedback.
After a break for munchies in the form of pizza kindly supplied by Campaign Monitor the presentations were finished off with Stuart’s talk which discussed JavaScript and some nice features that are already built into particular browsers. All the methods discussed can be achieved using a variety of frameworks but it was interesting to know which methods were supported without a framework in particular browsers.
I’m really looking forward to our next Multipack Presents event which is currently being organised, we’re asking for feedback on what you would like to see discussed, so if you want to be heard post your comment on the Multipack blog. Until then, maybe I’ll catch up with you at the March meet.