The Antidote for Cowboy Coding

This is a guest post by Kilian Valkhof, co-organizer of Fronteers

The web is divided, there are people that adhere to the international standards and have their websites work in all browsers, and cowboy coders, called that way because they ‘code without rules’. Unfortunately, cowboy coders far outnumber real web developers. It’s time to change that.

Fronteers is the dutch branch organization for front-end developers (the people that write CSS, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX) and the first of it’s kind internationally. It was set up last year in September and is run completely by volunteers. Within a year, they already have around 120 members, a figure that continues to grow.

Why is this good? Members of Fronteers are actively working on making their websites better, and making them work for more people. A wholly different world from the “it works in my browser”-excuses of old. As more people start working like this, the web will become better for everyone.

That is why Fronteers is organizing a two day conference on the 11th and 12th of September. With a heavy focus on CSS and JavaScript, it’s sure to be of interest for anyone working with the web. During those two days, industry heavyweights such as Dean Edwards, Andy Clarke, Bert Bos (W3C), Christian Heilmann (Yahoo!) and Stuart Langridge (Lugradio) will talk about topics ranging from Maintainable CSS to JavaScript closures and from the CSS box-model to the HTML5 video elements.

As is the case in so many professions, there is not just one good way to build websites. That’s why the conference also has a secondary track where there will be in-depth discussions on topics such as CSS, SEO, and Accessibility. A perfect opportunity to ask Christian Heilmann of Yahoo! about their website, or the makers of the Dutch Web Accessibility Guidelines about said guidelines.

Of interest to many web workers will also be a presentation held by Pete LePage. LePage is a member of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and currently works on their new browser, Internet Explorer 8. The presentation is said to provide insight into the browsers’ improvements that are yet to come.

The two-day conference costs 250 euros. Members of the Fronteers organization get a discount. For more information about the congress, visit the congress website.