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Molly Holzschlag talked about HTML5 (yes, apparently the convention is no space between HTML and 5) at the MIX 10 conference. I didn’t get any ground-breaking knowledge into the workings of, say, the <video /> tag, but I did get some insights into what’s happening with HTML5 that I’d like to share. For a more technical reference to HTML5, Holzschlag recommended Dive into HTML5.

© 2010 MIX

You might have noticed that I did not link HTML5 to W3C’s specification of the language, but rather to the Wikipedia entry. The reason for that is not just the entry on Wikipedia is much easier to read than any academical spec, but also that W3C’s spec is not necessarily the official spec – or least not the only recognized spec. Molly Holzschlag explained how members of the XHTML 2.0 working group in 2004 grew tired of the slow progress and seemingly wrong direction of what was at the time supposed to be the next generation of HTML, and formed their own working group known as WHAT-WG. These “cowboys”, as Holzschlag likes to call them, very quickly (that is, they did in less than a year!) reached consensus on a new spec and further managed to get all the major browser vendors on board. As a result, W3C eventually shut down their XHTML 2 working group and started their own HTML5 working which adapts and formalizes the WHAT-WG spec into the the long legal specs we know and love … right.

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I did a well-received talk on ActiveRecord at last year’s Community Day. Community Day ’09 was the first of its kind in Copenhagen, and it was quite successful in bringing developers with different technical backgrounds together as well as attracting students – probably because of the free beer :)

Community Day in Copenhagen is back again this year, so reserve May 27 if you are near Copenhagen and like free tech-talks, networking and beer. This year Daniel Frost, the Microsoft evangelist that makes it happen, has involved me and several other developers actively in the planning of the day. With CD ’10 we have raised the level of ambition – bigger venue, more people, more talks and if course more fun.

We will have 20 sessions distributed on four concurrent tracks covering a surprisingly wide number of topics – very few of the talks are on Microsoft-technologies, in fact so few that we might loose a few of those .NET consultants who thinks anything non-MS are not worth listening to ;) Still, if you are doing anything at all related to the web (and most of us are, right?) you will surely find topics such as HTML 5, Single Sign On, Azure, Advanced jQuery etc. interesting.

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Rails 3 is just around the corner. It is optimized for the better performance and superior features of Ruby 1.9, but it also plays nicely with version 1.8.7. Ruby 1.8.6, on the other hand, cannot run Rails 3. This might not be a problem for you at all. If you are on a Mac, you were probably faced with Ruby 1.8.7 last year at the latest, when the upgrade to Snow Leopard changed the built-in Ruby version from 1.8.6 to 1.8.7. Most applications built for 1.8.6 runs fine on 1.8.7 – but many servers and deployment environments still runs only 1.8.6.

For me, the situation is like this: My standard version of Ruby on my development machine is 1.8.7. I deploy to many different environments, some (the ones I have a degree of control over) runs 1.8.7 and others (such as Heroku and some customer’s servers) runs 1.8.6. I can test and code away happily only to get some ugly exceptions when I deploy because I have called count on an array instead of length. Further, I also want to play with the new features of Ruby 1.9 and run Rails 3 on it. And that’s not to mention that I also use alternative Ruby implementations such as JRuby for projects where I need to tap into Java libraries.

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