Web Directions North is an internationally respected conference for web professionals. This year’s conference was a good high level overview of the new trends and technologies online. Some of these trends are emerging organically and we need to react to them and others are good ideas which need the support of developers to be adopted.

While the talks covered a variety of subjects there was a lot of overlap on these main themes:

Open data

Open data formats like XFN, microformats, and APIs are encouraging sites to share data between them. This allows sites to combine data for display in new ways, to make new connections between data, and to formulate it is more user friendly ways. Users may one day be able to manage their profiles, passwords, and social networks from one central account.

Mobile & Accessible Interfaces

In a few years there will be more people in the world with the ability to access the web with a mobile device than with a computer. Designing for browsing devices challenges designers to consider different contexts and device capabilities. Bright sunlight makes low contrast sites hard to read, common input devices like a keyboard and mouse may not be available. These are the same challenges developers face making interfaces accessible and there are over lapping.

Dynamic User Interfaces

Many websites are providing their users with the ability to customize what information is displayed to them and how. Many more sites which don’t provide these services are being altered by users anyway using special browser add-ons or websites which take data from existing websites and find new ways to display it.

There are also ties between these three trends – open and accessible data is easier to gather for customization with a different user interfaces which take into account different user needs like mobility or accessibility. Some examples:

Ironfeathers

This site uses Google Maps API to display running routes but it has removed the inaccessible Google Map controls and replaced them with their own custom accessible buttons. Try zooming in on the map in Google Maps using only your keyboard – then try it on Ironfeathers.

Everyblock

This site brings together data from government websites for the police and city hall, commercial sites like craigslist and social sites like Flickr in one place where it customizes it to make it more accessible, searchable, and explorable.

Twitter

This site has an open API and presents all its data as microformats. It has made it super easy for spin off sites like foamee. Foamee doesn’t require you to create a new username, password and profile – it just makes use of your twitter one. You don’t login and update foamee from your computer you just text message it.

I also had good conversations with the Microsoft representatives about the version meta tag they are planning on introducing in IE8, the BBC team about CMSs and centralized CSS (we’ve got it easy), and several free lance designers about client management strategies.

It was encouraging to see that BCIT is headed in the right direction with the incorporation of microformats into contacts and VTcal, to get confirmation that standards are still the leading industry concern, and know that our work on the Marqui templates will be moving us in the right direction to create a mobile version of the site.

Web Directions North is an international conference for people who work with the web, from project managers to web programmers to web designers. This year it was hosted in Vancouver and a few of us jumped at the opportunity to go and were grateful to have the department’s support.

The conference covered a good balance of theoretical big thinking ideas and practical hands on code ideas and we were fortunate to come home with both things to work towards in the long run and ideas that could be implemented immediately.

These are a few of the “big picture” ideas that stood out to us:

• User Experience – It’s the difference between making a website as popular as the SunDisk Sansa MP3 player and making a website as popular as the iPod. Many of the speakers talked about the ways they integrate user experience design and testing into their work early in the project process and what a huge positive impact it has had on their websites.
• Web Standards – All the presenters were strong advocates of web standards. They also argued against the idea that all a website needs to meet standards is to be well coded. In their eyes a website with standards has high standards – it should also be accessible, backwards compatible, built using the principles of progressive enhancement, semantic, and have good user experience.
• Ajax – There was a lot of discussion about Ajax, what it is, why it has become popular, and where and how to best use it. It was advocated that sites should be built to function perfectly without Ajax and Ajax can be added after to enhance user experience. There were also some user experience issues identified with using Ajax and some solutions proposed.

These ideas touch on difference skill sets and the presenters who talked about project management felt that the ideal web team would consist of a mix of individuals with skills that cross the disciplines of development, design, usability, and content. This structure keeps the team nimble, and promotes rapid prototyping for continuous improvement.

It’s rare that a conference provides information you can act on the next day when you sit back down at you desk but these are ideas we found immediately useful:

• Microformats – Microformats are a standardized way to add CSS to XHTML to code standardized information such as addresses and events so that programs such as address books and calendars can import them with a single click if you have a newer browser or the right plugins. The contacts application (bcit.ca/contacts) has been rewritten to use microformats and the new version launched March 6^th!
• Mashups – A mashup is when part of a website is integrated into another website. You might have seen a Google Maps mashup like this one: http://blogs.bcit.ca/catttrax2/journey/route. One of the sessions covered what’s involved in beginning a mashup and now a campus map mashup is on the way!
• Progressive Enhancement – This is a “big idea” about how to code and a shift from the old concept of “graceful degradation”. The suggestion is that content should be written first and then semantic code, presentation, and behavior should be added on top of it in layers so that the core content is still accessible and intelligible if it is accessed without the presentation and behavior layers. The contacts application was rewritten using the principles of progressive enhancement; check it out with JavaScript or CSS turned off!

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these ideas the presentation summaries and notes are available on the Web Directions North website or you can talk to Brandon, Alan or me :)

I spotted this little CSS tidbit in a presenter’s code at the Web Directions North conference a few weeks ago and now I’m wondering if this is the sort of thing I missed out on by being self taught:

table
{
border-collapse: collapse;
}

There are quite a few tables I’ve designed where this would have been very useful.