Polyfills For The Pragmatist, and What if CSS Made Sense?

6:00 - 7:00: What if CSS Made Sense? by Eric Meyer

7:00 - 7:30: Food!

7:30 - 9:00: Polyfills For The Pragmatist, by Jason Johnston

What if CSS Made Sense?

by Eric Meyer

CSS is becoming more powerful and more complex every year. Our designs are the best they have ever been, but the code to build them is out of control. For a beginner, CSS is a minefield of browser inconsistencies and secret workarounds. You don't use positioning to lay out your page, you use floats (remember to display: inline), and then you clear those floats with overflow: hidden. It makes perfect sense!

That's no way to write maintainable code.

But what if you could write CSS that made sense, that everyone could read, and all without repeating yourself throughout the document? What if you could call a column a column and leave it at that?

You can. With the abstractions available in pre-processors, you can create and share simple tools that make CSS more specific, simple, and concrete than ever before. I'll show you how tools like Sass, Compass, and Susy can make your CSS workflow, maintenance, and learning-curve easier.

About Eric Meyer

Eric A. Meyer is a multimedia artist and developer specializing in collaborative creation. Formerly Artistic Director of New Word Arts and Technical Director of The LIDA Project, he is now a founding partner at OddBird, designing and building custom web sites and applications (most recently a test case management system for Mozilla). Eric is a member of the Compass core development team, and the creator of Susy and other Compass plugins. He also makes music+art with Teacup Gorilla, and writing+performance with Vicious Trap. He is currently combining everything for "Into the Green Green Mud" a multimedia digital love-story with original music, web-fonts, and animation (greengreenmud.com).

Polyfills For The Pragmatist

by Jason Johnston

Of course we all love the power of HTML5, CSS3, and new JavaScript APIs in today's modern browsers. But what about when your users are running outdated browsers, and giving them a degraded experience just isn't an option?

Polyfills to the rescue! But there are so many available, and lots of pros and cons to consider. In this session we'll introduce several of the more useful ones, discuss their features and pitfalls, and explore some of the details of how they work their magic. When we're done you'll be able to use polyfills like a pro, and maybe even create your own!

About Jason Johnston

Jason Johnston is an engineer at Sencha where he helps create next-generation developer tools and frameworks for the open Web. He is also the creator of the popular CSS3 PIE polyfill. A classically trained musician with a degree in piano performance, Jason approaches writing software the same way he approaches music: a dynamic blend of art and science, requiring constant practice, where there is always room for further refinement and creativity.