@mediaAjax day 2.4: Dojo 1.0: great experiences for everyone

The enthusiasm of Alex Russell, the speaker for the fourth session of the second day of @mediaAjax, was apparent instantly -- he spoke almost continuously, rapidly and coherently for the full hour of his talk: quite an achievement! He opened by listing "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" and relating them to the web, but there was so much new information contained in this part of his talk that I couldn't take it all in. I did remember a few choice quotes, such as:

• The idea that we'll continue to limp along using Java is laughable given languages like Python, Ruby, Erlang
• Not caring that it's broken is our best weapon on the open web... if we had to care about everything that was broken we'd never get anything done.
• The HTML/JS/CSS stack is wickedly hard to learn (because of bugs and interactions -- the basic stuff was easy for basic sites in the 1990s).
• HTTP is one of the best things to happen to mankind … compound interest, penicillin, the wheel and HTTP! LOL!
• And the most important for understanding the rest of his talk was: Good semantics allow you to say what you mean and get what you want. (But at the moment we only have one or the other -- HTML/CSS are currently liabilities, e.g. menu, tree, video, column...)

As for Dojo, the mantra was "build with (dojo), not on", which I hope I remember correctly was meant to imply that there Dojo team want to work closely with developers, and developers, so is the talk it doesn't do what you want then ask!

Dojo's approach is obviously different from jQuery, not only because they supply widgets and are committed to accessibility (whereas jQuery is low level and leaves the consideration of accessibility to the developer), but also in action because they use custom attributes within the HTML markup. Alex gave as an example a simple lightbox widget that used something like the following markup:
<img src="img1.png" dojoType="dojox.image.lightbox" group="a" />
<img src="img1.png" dojoType="dojox.image.lightbox" group="a" />
which Dojo and converts into a lightbox slideshow.

Alex also emphasised their commitment to WAI ARIA "states and roles", their enthusiasm about HTML 5 and how they look forward to browsers implementing HTML 5 so that they can ditch all of the extra code that it would make redundant.

(It was a great talk but information-packed talk and I'm sure I've missed stuff...)