Recently Andy and I were fortunate enough to attend the Full Frontal JavaScript conference, which was held in a cinema (the Duke of York cinema to be precise). Once the overwhelming sense of déjà vu had passed (See KPG Awards Ceremony), things drifted along smoothly.

Here's a rundown of the highs and lows of the conference (inspired by Colin's Sketcha Kucha I have decided to 'Sketch-a-Speaker', and so I present...)

Christian Heilmann

The conference was kicked off with a trip down JavaScript memory lane by Christian Heilmann, a speaker who is well known on the JavaScript / Accessibility conference circuit. He spoke about the hideous misuses of JavaScript in the past, the slightly less hideous misuses in the present and where JavaScript should be embraced with open arms. 

Robert Nyman

Robert followed with a similar opening to Christian's theme - speaking about the background of JavaScript, what it is and where it came from. Whilst everyone was feeling comfortable about the pace of the conference and how easy things were to understand, Robert switched to full on tech savvy mode by breaking down code structuring, leaving us very shaken and slightly scared but thoroughly interested. 

Peter-Paul Koch (on W3C Widgets)

Peter-Paul was a real character. In his talk entitled 'W3C Widgets' he forgot to talk about... W3C widgets. Instead, he went off on an interesting tangent about his new found job as a relentless mobile (phone) browser tester for Vodafone. The Blackberry browser is dead, iPhone has the slowest JavaScript performance, Opera has the fastest (and rules), and mobile webkit isn't actually like webkit. According to Peter-Paul at least...

The most useful part of the talk was the explanation of using CSS to shape the layout of the website on your mobile. E.g.

/* If the devices max width is 300 pixels, then override some of the main css styles (such as widths greater than 300 pixels) */

@media all and (max-device-width: 300px) {
    Override styles here...
}

Stuart Langridge

Stuart threw himself straight into explaining the future of JavaScript through HTML 5. He explained numerous handy functions, simple JavaScript libraries that make the the front end developers life easier and the use of global storage. He then revealed that these all exist already! They just aren't well enough supported at the moment. Shame that. 

Todd Kloots

Todd Kloots is as cool as his name suggests. He proves you can be knowledgeable about programming languages without being socially inept. Todd spoke about the W3C ARIA standard, which sets out a number of attributes that can be added to html elements to aid assistive technologies when understanding source code. These come under the guise of either:

'Roles' where you specify what the HTML element's role is. E.g. role="menu / menuitem / tab / etc".

or

'Props' to explain the state of the HTML element. E.g. aria-hidden (to ignore sepcific elements), aria-hasmenuitem="true / false" to inform the user that the current element has related elements. 

Jake Archibald - Optimising where it hurts

Jake's a funny man, he compared Internet Explorer 6 to a dead moomin and Internet Explorer 7 to a gold plated dead moomin. He gave some very useful information on browser's JavaScript performance, through endless bar charts (brownie points). He also gave probably the best tip of the conference, to test JavaScripts execute time simply output the date/time before and after a function. E.g.

document.write(date.getMilliseconds());

for(i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
    // do something 10000 times
}

document.write(date.getMilliseconds()); 

Simon Willison

Simon was the last speaker (no enviable task). It was a very technical talk about server side JavaScript using evented Input / Output through the use of a JavaScript library called node.js. He showed some impressive demonstrations of pushing content out to browsers (in real time) when changes occured on a server. 

It was all really interesting stuff, and in between speakers a live Twitter feed was streamed onto the cinema screen, filtered by people tagging their tweets with #fullfrontal...

"Just got a cup of tea at #fullfrontal" *sigh*

"had a nice lunch at the pub next door from the #fullfrontal" *yawn*

"the last speaker was rubbish at #fullfrontal" ouch!

DISCLAIMER: The sketches are in no way meant to represent real people, no matter how much it may seem that way.