High Performance CSS – Antony Kennedy

Although simple to write, CSS can very quickly become nothing but a tangle of legacy code and technical debt dragging your website kicking and screaming into the muddy swamps of melodramatic poor performance hell. Antony gives some simple tips on how to keep your CSS small, fast and simple, with particular emphasis on build scripts and concatenation to only serve your users what they need and nothing else.

About Antony

Antony is currently describing himself as a lead front-end engineer.He has worked on many high traffic sites for companies such as the BBC, BSkyB, Tesco, Disney and Channel4. He is an advocate of good processes and agile development and writes (infrequently) about these and web development on his blog Zeroed and Noughted. He has just finished co-authoring Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites. He recently released an album on iTunes which is in absolutely no danger of threatening any charts any time soon.

Transitions, Transforms, Animations – Inayaili de León

The shiny bits of the CSS3 specification have been delighting us over the last year or two. “CSS3 Matrix Animation”, “Pure CSS3 AT-AT Walker”, “Star Wars opening crawl using only CSS3″; soon, we will have entire CSS3 feature films. But all that glitters is not gold. How far is far enough? How can we work with these new tools to our users’ and our own advantage? In this talk, we will explore how these new techniques are important to the modern day web designer, how best to use them and how they can improve everyone’s experience.

About Inayaili

Inayaili is a London-based web designer from Portugal who currently works for Canonical (the creators of Ubuntu). Self-taught when it comes to web design, Inayaili has a degree in Communications Design. Inayaili speaks at conferences when she can and writes for 24 Ways, Smashing Magazine, and .net magazine as well as on her own blog, Web Designer Notebook. Her book, Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites will be published by Apress in Spring 2011.

10 things you might not know about CSS 3 – Lea Verou

By now most of you know how to use the popular new CSS3 features in your stylesheets, to embed custom fonts and easily create rounded corners, drop shadows, and scalable designs with media queries. However, below the surface, there are many other things that CSS3 brings and most web developers have never heard of. In this talk Lea will present many CSS3 features that are useful but underrated, as well as uncommon ways of utilizing the CSS3 features you already know about, in order to do much more with even less images and code.

About Lea

Lea is a front-end engineer currently living in Greece. She discovered programming at the young age of 12 (web development a few years after) and it was love at first …line. In 2008, she co-founded Fresset Ltd, whose websites have attracted a large following in the Greek internet scene. They are currently working frantically on their first international project. During her spare time, she blogs about CSS, JavaScript and web usability at leaverou.me. Follow Lea on Twitter.

Adaptive layouts – Patrick Lauke

You thought the debate about which screen resolution you should design your sites for has been settled, now that everybody is sporting the latest 50″ monitors on their desktop machines? Think again, as the sheer explosion of new “mobile” devices (smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and everything in between) has once again brought back the issue of making your site work in a variety of sizes – from a tiny phone to a gigantic web-enabled TV. We’ll look at some of the new techniques – CSS 3 Media Queries and viewport instructions – that help designers make their sites adapt to a different displays and devices.

About Patrick

Patrick works as Web Evangelist in the Developer Relations team at Opera. He’s often found lurking at conferences, ranting profusely about the pragmatic uses for HTML5 and CSS 3. His personal corner of the web can be found at splintered.co.uk.

The Home of the Future: CSS Layout Modules – Peter Gasston

CSS 3 has greatly expanded the toolbox we use to display the content of our websites, but has yet to seriously address the fundamental way we lay out that content. This talk will take a look at the many methods which have been proposed to tackle this issue, both currently and in the future, and discuss the pros and cons of each.

About Peter

Peter has been making websites for over 12 years and is currently a developer and web technology evangelist at digital agency Poke London. He enjoys talking about and teaching CSS and front-end development. He wrote for many years at CSS3.info, has been published in .net Magazine, and his first book, The Book of CSS3, is released in May 2011.

Useful information:

• The event is free, but there is a minimum spend at the bar to cover room costs. Food is available for purchase and we’ll have a break at 2pm. If you like the talks, you could buy the speakers and organisers a drink.
• I haven’t personally visited the venue so don’t know how wheelchair accessible it is. Please contact the venue directly to find out.
• The running order isn’t decided yet.
• The emphasis is on informality and discussion. Talks are 30 minutes long. The first talk will start promptly at 1pm.
• Space is limited. Please use the signup form to let us know numbers but first come, first served. Only guarantee of a place is to be at the venue for 12:30. We’ll start promptly at 13:00.