Last year I returned to Darwin after a few years working in London for a Web Experience Management company called Squiz UK.
Living in London meant that you were blessed with tens of thousands of people that shared similar interests to you, and many of them were a hell of a lot smarter and better than you at their chosen niche.
This also meant that people were willing to share that knowledge, in this case Web Standards, and thus the London Web Standards was born.
Now while Darwin does not have the numbers that London contains, the ratio of people interested in web site development, web site design, and web standards must be similar.
With that in mind I started a meetup group, Darwin Web Standards, shortly after I returned to try and foster a small community of like minded people to share ideas, thoughts, and questions with each other in a friendly atmosphere (aka the pub).
14 months later and we’ve got 39 members in the group, we’ve conducted 8 meetups with 4 different presenters. ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL.
Enough of this, where’s the HTML5 you spoke about
Although there are some passionate and very smart people in Darwin, I always found that the London, New York, and Sydney meetups were able to attract a higher caliber of speakers at their meetups purely because that is where the Internet celebrities live.
After sending off one or two emails & tweets to the organisers of Web Directions I was excited to see a message come back asking about the opportunity to run a HTML5 workshop in Darwin.
Web Directions have always been strong supporters of the Darwin Web Standards group and provide the members with much appreciated discount codes to help with the burden of travel and accommodation down to Sydney for their events, and now they’re making the trip up here to make it even easier.
John Allsopp will be running HTML5 – Beyond the Markup in August (date yet to be confirmed). From the website…
What will I learn?
In this in-depth hands on workshop, you’ll learn about and put into practice the key elements you need to know about to start building apps with web technologies.
- New form elements, attributes and APIs for creating rich HTML5 application interfaces.
- Features of HTML5 that allow applications and sites to still be usable when the user is offline, and to store data during a session, and between sessions.
- Learn how to include audio and video to be played natively in the browser, with fallbacks for older browsers.
- Get a solid understanding of the 2D drawing capabilities of the HTML5 Canvas
- The ability to know where the user is, whether they’re using a mobile or desktop device can greatly improve the experiences we can create. Learn how you can locate and track your users using the W3C geolocation standard.
- HTML5 and related W3C technologies are increasingly providing the sorts of goodies we’ve had to rely on jQuery, other JavaScript libraries, and plug-ins like Flash to provide. We’ll also be covering some of the well supported W3 standards that are making developers’ lives easier, and enabling new, standards based user experiences.
Who is the HTML5 Darwin Workshop targeted towards?
It’s targeted towards anyone with an interest with the web. While you will get the most out of the workshop if you’re already familiar with HTML it doesn’t mean that someone who manages their web presence without any technical knowledge won’t walk away with some fantastic new ideas to work on for their site.
For web developers and design enthusiasts this really is an exciting opportunity to learn from the very best (did you know that John practically started the path to responsive design). For managers this is a great chance for you to reward, train and develop your staff to learn more without the added burden of flights and accommodation.
This workshop is for anyone who is ready to start building apps using web technologies. The core focus is the features of HTML5, particularly DOM APIs, and what they enable, not JavaScript. So, if you are comfortable with CSS and HTML, you will be fine with this workshop.
However, we will cover aspects of the DOM, and there’ll be a little bit of JavaScript involved, but there’s no need to be a Ninja!
Sounds awesome, but why are you pushing it so hard?
You may be thinking that I’m on the hard sell. Truth be told I’ll be paying for a ticket and attending the workshop myself because I know it’s a great opportunity.
I’m pushing everyone else hard to also come along because I love the industry, and the more people that get involved means that there are more people to talk to, share ideas with and work on amazing projects together.
For anyone interested in attending the workshop send me an email, tweet myself or tweet john directly and tell him your excited about the opportunity.
If you’d like to learn more about the web today, make sure you join the Darwin Web Standards meetup group and come along to the meetings with all of your thoughts, questions, and ideas.
I might even buy you a beer.
Beer not necessarily garunteed, and probably only a pot not a pint ;)
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