I recently attended the SXSW convention in Austin, Texas. The great thing about this convention was meeting others in the technology field and getting a chance to hear the best of the best speak about the latest bleeding edge technologies coming in the near future. There were many great questions were raised and discussed at the conference such as: social media security, how to manage content in a world where content is coming from the user, and the future of digital publishing (all of which I may write about in a future post).

However, some of the big takes in regards to web development from the conference are:

HTML 5

The next big iteration of HTML, one of the core languages that is used to built a website, HTML 5 introduces a wide variety of upgrades aimed to improved accessibility, reduced the need for 3^rd party plug-ins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc..), and added APIs for Web 2.0.

Some specific elements of HTML 5 will..

1. Allow users to display MP4 and MOV videos in a player that can be styled, scaled, and cross-browser compatible without the use of Adobe Flash. This will reduce time it takes for a developer to specifically render a video to a player in Adobe Flash.
2. The semantics in HTML have added new tags defining certain parts of an HTML document that will no doubt allow for improved SEO techniques.
   Examples: <header>,<footer>,<nav>,<section>,<article>
3. Tedious but important tasks such as data validation are made easier with HTML 5. Instead of writing a custom validators or grabbing a Javascript algorithm off the web (what most developers tend to do) which can lead to inconsistency and/or security risks, HTML 5 has built-in data handling and special objects which take in certain data type such as URL, dates, number, or a range.
4. Better support for user accessibility (such as synchronizing video with text).

CSS 3

The next iteration of CSS will ease stylers when styling websites with web 2.0 designs. Some of the main take-away in CSS 3 are:

1. Allow stylers to rotate images at any angles.
2. Set rgba – The ‘a’ means alpha transparency!
3. Shadow capabilities around text and dropdown boxes. This feature along with border radius will make creating those pesky rounded corners easier!
4. Multiple backgrounds in a DIV.
5. Nonrestrictive font. Instead of sticking to web-friendly font such as Times or Verdana, any font library can be uploaded to the web server and consumed by the user and the website. Yes, with CSS 3, you can now set a source location for your font-face!
6. Styles with logic. For example there’s a style command that will only apply to the last row of a table cell or apply to all the rolls except the last cell.

Here is a web-page that utilizes a lot of the CSS 3 components I mentioned earlier. http://sxswcss3.com/ Note that CSS 3 is still cutting edge so some of the new functionality will not work in your browser. It definitely won’t work in IE.

Phone Gap + JQTouch For Mobile App Development

One of the most exciting things I learned at SXSW is that I can utilize the skills and technologies I have been building on everyday be directly ported over to mobile app development. The traditional web languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, and even PHP can be directly applied to mobile app development. Instead of starting from square one and learn the world of Objective-C, that phase of the learning curve can be entirely skipped. (Object-C does have its place in app development especially if you want to create games or fairly complex applications.)

Phone Gap is an open-source development tool that allows developers to create apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, or Android using traditional web development languages. It even has libraries that will allow developers to tap into some of the mobile device’s built in hardware features such as the camera, speakers, GPS, and vibrating mechanisms. For some example apps that was built using Phone Gap click here.

JQTouch is build by the creators of JQuery and is basically a development library that will replicate a lot of the eye-candy effects on the iPhone. These effects range from the waiting daisy circles to the page slide effects.

WebHooks, Yahoo Pipes, and YQL

WebHooks, Yahoo Pipes, and YQL are all tools that can be used for web mash-ups. Mash-ups are basically consuming two or more services into a single representation. So hypothetically if you wanted to create a website that showed a map of all your Facebook buddies who have Twitter accounts you would mash-up data sources coming from Google Maps, Facebook, and Twitter. I haven’t done much of this, but it does seem pretty powerful and can be a great tool for social software.