@mediaAjax day 2.2: Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery

In day 2, session 2 of @mediaAjax, John Resig gave an excellent demonstration of the elegance and simple syntax of jQuery, so much so that I'm inspired to use it to replace/augment my teaching of the DOM next year. He said his slides would be available and that the jQuery site has lots of documentation and tutorials, so I'll not reproduce the example code here; suffice it to say that jQuery looks good, useful and relevant to what my students need to know

Some of the extra details he gave: jQuery's Ajax support allows 3rd party JSON and uses something like eval or a dynamic <script>. jQuery supports a document "ready" event that triggers before "onload" to allow the JS to manipulate the DOM before the user sees it. jQuery is extensible and also interacts well with Firebug (as John demoed) and leverages the DOM so that it also works with XML documents loaded e.g. through Ajax.

He finished with a geek tease, showing a JavaScript port of a visualisation tool ("processing") running on <canvas> with super-cool, interactive graphics -- tease/cool!

@mediaAjax day 1.3: Real world accessibility for Ajax-enhanced web apps

Derek Featherstone is an entertaining speaker and I always enjoy his @media talks. The 3rd talk of @mediaAjax was no different but he touched only lightly on the Ajax accessibility question: he talked about taking Google Maps and replacing the naff <div onclick…> "buttons" with real buttons for his ironman site, demoed using DNS (everytime I see someone else use DNS I find out better ways of using it ... I'm such a novice!) His use of a hidden form field updated via JS to signal unobtrusive JS changes to a page in response to onfocus events that screenreaders don't otherwise pick up was good advice and it was great to see him emphasise semantic markup, unobtrusive JS approaches and accessibility, but I'd have liked a bit more Ajax-related stuff (I'm desperate to find ways of "fixing" the back button, for example.

@mediaAjax day 1.2: But I'm a bloody designer!

The second talk on the 1st day of @mediAjax was an entertaining talk from Mike Stenhouse about the upskilling necessary to be a good designer in a modern web development team and how Ajax makes it even more-so: Ajax means you're designing the user experience and need to know how that's going to interact with the server, which means you need to know some JavaScript, front-end and back-end code etc. He talked about experience using Agile and "scrum" development methodologies, pair development, which differs from "pair programming" in that the designer and developer work together on the design or the code, and the insights that enables. The most interesting bit from my pov was how neatly this ties-in with my interests in combining our "Web Development" field with Design (from a different Faculty) ... web designers and web developers are not such separate jobs these days.

@media 2007

London's @media 2007 was last week. Good content as ever, oddly the venue had no public WiFi (as usual!) Emotional "goodbyes" from Molly Holzschlag and Joe Clark at the start and end, respectively, bumped-up the emotion (I'll miss their talks: they've both had an influence on my web development educational practices.)

I particularly liked it when the "Hot Topics" panel (chaired and hopefully podcasted & transcribed by Jeremy Keith) aired my question about the relevance of higher education to web dev. careers versus "self education", which seems to be the most common. An ex-university audience-member said that courses responded too slowly and were taught by arrogant, uninterested lecturers to reflect current practices! Happily a chap from Salford, IIRC, jumped-up to say that not all lecturers were disinterested in standards-based education — it was why he was there — but that he believed he was probably alone. I was sorry not to be brave enough to leap up and shout "You're not alone!" & then missed him as he left ... ah well, perhaps he'll appear on the attendees list at microformats.org??

Added: A useful set of summaries and links from AlastairC & technorati atmedia2007 tags...