Fronteers conf '17
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Fronteers conference , held at Pathé Tuschinski in Amsterdam. A single track conference covering various topics of frontend development. The JDriven delegation this year consists of Patrick Ooteman, Auke Speksnijder and Martijn van der Wijst. Topics are: VR, Animations, Developer tools, Caching, a11y, and WebAssembly. The talks didn’t just cover javascript, CSS and HTML. Also relating subjects like writing better language, tackling imposter syndrome and Japanese culture came by. There even was a separate talk focused on emojis :) We’ll try to summarize the nicest takeaways from the past couple of days.
To start off, Niels Leenheer gives a talk about the importance of when to use and also when not to use progressive enhancement. You can imagine that a video tag can be replaced by an image for devices that don’t support the native video tag. But Youtube without videos, yeah, that won’t work at all. After the audience loudly applaudes to an image of ‘goodbye Internet Explorer’, he emphasises that browser wars are a good thing. When every browser would run on Webkit (or nowadays even Chromium), the need to make browsers better would decrease. Also he said:
IE6 was a good browser
Daring statement! But then when you think about it, at the time it could do awesome things. IE6 became a pain in the ass for developers only later, when modern browsers came around and people were still using IE6. Key takeaway of the talk: think about users, not about browsers.
