Into the lion’s den: Flirting with the Flash community
Friday, 10 August 2007Yahoo Europe’s web standards evangelist-in-chief Christian Heilmann is heading into unchartered territory - he’s going to give a presentation to a bunch of professional Flashers at Flashforum Konferenz 2007 in Cologne in September he’s calling Emancipated JavaScript and the Coming Out of the Flash community.
JavaScript developers discarded the stigmata of the “move stuff around, require certain browser settings and pop things up” days of DHTML and embraced Dom Scripting and later on Ajax taking over the web application world by storm. By now having JavaScript as an interest on your CV does not get you a confused shake of the head but is actually sought after by headhunters. There are a lot of parallels in the misunderstandings of JavaScript as a technology in the past and those that keep Flash from being a mainstream developer technology and I will try to show them and offer options to set these straight.
For me, Christian has hit the nail on the head. I’m proud to be a Flash developer at Yahoo!, and I have the respect of all my web-standards-loving coworkers because they really get that Flash is a tool that, used properly, can really enhance the user’s experience. Christian’s aim is to help other Flashers around the world to “come out” and convince their standardista colleagues that Flash is not always evil. He’s also a great public speaker, so if you get the chance to go along then I’d recommend you check out Christian’s talk.
