May 2010 – Craig Nicol

Outrunning the lions

Just a short post today (stop cheering at the back). I’ll do a longer post on the html5 survey next month, it’s still open if you want to fill it in.

There are two explorers in the jungle, who come to a clearing and find themselves face to face with a lion. One of them immediately takes off his backpack and starts putting on his trainers. “What are you doing?” asks his friend, “You can’t outrun a lion.”

“I don’t have to outrun the lion,” he replies, “I just have to outrun you.”

When you’re you are choosing your security, or your feature set, are you trying to outrun the lion or are you just trying to outrun the competition? IE6 got away with a lot because it only had to outrun Netscape 4. Chrome re-wrote the rule book on browser speed and html5 features because it was trying to outrun the lion, not just ie and FireFox. Decide for yourself which browser represents the software you want to write.

Now, how about I move to California and start a motivational speaking course…

HTML5 : The language of the cloud

I had a great time at DDD Scotland, so many thanks again to the organisers and everyone who came. As promised, here are the slides for my talk : HTML5 : The language of the cloud? in HTML5 format. The talk was given in Firefox 3.6 with the MiniMap (geoDiscovery) and Tails Export (microformat) extensions. If you have to make any tweaks to get it working in your favourite browser, let me know and I’ll update the file.

For a bit of fun, I’ve put together a short survey on HTML5 to gauge responses to some of the discussions I’ve had since the talk. I will publish the results in an upcoming post.

Finally, for ease of access, here’s a list of the important links from the talk for those of you who missed them: