Wild World Web and Styling Forms Semantically & Accessibly

We have two great talks lined up this month:

Wild World Web: Web Development in a World of Ever-Changing Browsers, Platforms & Compatibilities by Rob Larsen

Styling Forms Semantically & Accessibly by Amanda Cheung

Rob will also be giving away two copies of his book The Uncertain Web (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QUBHNQC?ie=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393177&creativeASIN=B00QUBHNQC&linkCode=shr&tag=drunkenfistcom&linkId=TCHOGLNBKTYXWZKA&sr=&qid=)
Thanks to Vermonster (http://www.vermonster.com/) for sponsoring Pizza

Wild World Web by Rob Larsen

How can front-end web developers make the transition out of developing with known goals and tools into the new world of development in the midst of uncertainty?

Approaching the web today requires that the web developer let go of hard and fast rules, and begins to design for uncertainty.

Embracing uncertainty as a core tenet of web development and scrapping the rules we've relied on in the past few years is the best bet for creating future proof web solutions. By combining web standards, progressive enhancement, an iterative approach to design and development and a desire to question the status quo; web development teams can create sites and applications that should perform well in a wide range of present and future devices. By focusing on optimal solutions with intelligent fallbacks and forgoing the desire for absolute solutions, design and development can work together to create a web that is fast, widely available and reliable.

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Rob is an experienced front end engineer, team lead and manager. Since 1999 (that's Web 1.0, if you're keeping track) been building web sites and applications for some of the world's biggest brands.

Rob is an active writer and speaker on web technology with a special focus on emerging standards like HTML5, CSS3 and the ongoing evolution of the JavaScript programming language. He is co-author ofProfessional jQuery (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118026683/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=drunkenfistcom&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1118026683), the author of Beginning HTML and CSS (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118340183/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=drunkenfistcom&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1118340183) and the author of The Uncertain Web (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QUBHNQC?ie=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393177&creativeASIN=B00QUBHNQC&linkCode=shr&tag=drunkenfistcom&linkId=TCHOGLNBKTYXWZKA&sr=&qid=), from O'Reilly. He's also active in the open source community (https://github.com/roblarsen).

In his career Rob has spent time at Sapient Global Markets, Isobar, The Brand Experience, Cramer and as an independent consultant. Over the course of his career Rob has solved unique problems for clients like Samsung, Motorola, Philips, Gillette, Boston’s Museum of Science, and Harvard Kennedy School.

Styling Forms Semantically & Accessibly by Amanda Cheung

First, we will cover semantic form markup: why it's important and how it affects the accessibility of the forms that live within our websites. Then, we'll move on to the cool stuff! Browsers build a lot of functionality into HTML forms that we should not be handling on our own. However, some of these features come with default styles that we may not want to put into our websites. Everyone knows what inputs and dropdowns look like out of the box. We want to customize the style of our forms to create better experiences for our users, but when does that start to hurt usability? Where do we draw the line? This talk will go over some of these situations. We will discuss how far we can go with styling snazzy forms while keeping these features intact as well as what's in the future.

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As lead UX developer at DockYard (http://dockyard.com/), Amanda is passionate about CSS architecture and organization. She also teaches classes with Girl Develop It (http://www.girldevelopit.com/chapters/boston).

Thanks to our Food Sponsor Vermonster for provided food and drinks.

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