In this entry I give some impressions of AEA Boston, as well as an attempt to compare the current web dev world with the old potlatch system.

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I just finished my An Event Apart Boston presentation on unbostrusive JavaScript, and as usual I'm posting my slides here.

Here they are (PDF, about 400K).

Sometimes browser vendors are appallingly insensitive. Despite my clear announcement that I’d be on holiday for two weeks, all four vendors saw fit to release major updates or important news items exactly in that period. Now I have to scramble to keep up with all the news, and the worst part is that I don’t really have any time until after An Event Apart Boston.

So this entry is mainly meant as a quick summary for myself. Without it I’d probably remember less than half of these important developments when I’ll restart my testing in a month or so.

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It’s nearly 1am now, and this is the only time slot I have available for a blog post about the two conferences I attended this week. Besides, I’m going on holiday in a few hours and it’s my unfailing habit to point that out here—and the fact that we have to be at the airport at the ungodly hour of 5am means that I’m not going to sleep tonight.

So let’s get it out of the way: I will be on holiday on Zakynthos, Greece, from 2 to 16 June, and it seems likely I’ll be completely unreachable during that time.

I’m hardly yet in a holiday mood; yesterday I returned from London at 11pm, still slightly the worse for wear after I’d spent the afternoon sipping pints with Dean Edwards, and today I had to do a lot of boring-but-necessary pre-holiday things such as finances, dropping stuff off, sending vital mails etc.

But I’m digressing. Let’s talk about conferences instead.

I went to two; Kings of Code in Amsterdam, a first-timer I spoke at; and the annual pilgrimage to @media 2008 in London, where I once more met a few of my British friends (and pints).

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Just now I posted the (Dutch) slides of my JavaScript Events presentation at Kings of Code.

Download them here. PDF file; about 620K.

I want to repeat this presentation in English at some conference somewhere, but I don't yet have specific plans. So if you can't read Dutch you'll have to have some patience.

Next month will be a busy, conference- and travel-rich month. September will be exactly the same, but fortunately I've got some spare time in between (time that I'm going to need for my next big project).

Before revealing my exact schedule, I've got a new speaking gig to announce: The Ajax Experience, September 29th to October 1st, Boston. I will present the "State of the Browsers" session, in which I'm going to discuss the failings of modern browsers when it comes to DOM support, as well as quizzing a few framework authors about their handling of browser incompatibilities. It's going to be huge fun and I'm looking forward to it.

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This is worth a formal note: getElementsByClassName() is now natively supported by the most recent versions of Firefox, Safari, and Opera. I added it to the compatibility tables. Obviously, as long as Certain Other Browsers do not support it we can't yet really use it everywhere, but it's a ray of hope.

And you wrote your custom getElementsByClassName() function to keep an eye on native implementations, didn't you?

function getElementsByClassName(node,classname) {
	if (node.getElementsByClassName)
		return node.getElementsByClassName(classname);
	else {
		// your custom function
	}
}