My fellow Osmolumnus Phil Hawksworth talking on Excessive Enhancement …
Phil talks about the power of standards, with a nod to Paul Downey’s The Web Is Agreement and The URL is the Thing.
“The seductive power of the possible”. Phil compares the original, raw, Macdonalds site to the recent beetle.de site. Yes, it’s HTML5, not Flash, BUT:
- 11mb of images
- 251 http requests
- no caching
“As you scroll, it lazily loads some images, the next 4MB of uncached images”
The beetle site arguably doesn’t really provide any more information than the original Macdonalds site. The URLs can’t be bookmarked and it takes an age to load!
Twitter is the next subject of Phil’s scorn! No Javascript? No love.
Now we get to Phil’s main point: Interface shizzle doesn’t have to break the web. His example is GitHub’s use of HTML5 history, with the animated slide effect. He notes you can use Levi Routes as a simple way to manage history (it’s the framework Paul Kinlan developed for our Google IO Talk).
Lots of great slides here, too many to post here, but he’ll be putting up the slideshow later on.
