The Web Moves Forward at W3Conf

Every year, the W3C holds a conference for web professionals where the latest on HTML, CSS, and everything else related to the open web platform is discussed and celebrated. This year I was fortunate enough to attend and it was thrilling to be around hundreds of other people that are as interested in the open standards movement as I am. Notable attendees like Chris Eppstein, Tab Atkins, and Chris Coyier made chatting between sessions just as interesting as the presentations themselves. Oh, also, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was there. Pretty cool.

The conference opened with the introduction of WebPlatform Docs, an effort from the W3C to create documentation for web standards, independent of brand, browser or platform. Currently, documentation is spread across many different sites, and the knowledge is often incomplete or biased towards one browser. Anyone can contribute to the WebPlatform wiki, and the hope is that it will soon become the de facto place for open standards documentation.

What became clear during the conference is that, not only is the WC3 itself very important to the open standards movement, but innovation is also being accelerated by tech companies like Adobe and Microsoft (both sponsors of the conference), and even individual developers creating “polyfills” and “shims” to – in essence – prototype new features and APIs before they become codified as a standard and formally adopted by all browsers.

All of the presentations are available to watch on the W3C YouTube Channel. The speakers represent the best and brightest in the open standards community, so I encourage you to check them out.