In the future, users will care more about your data than your website. Or at least according to Thursday’s Highland Fling 2008 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The event was organised by Alan White (who deserved his mid-afternoon snooze for all his efforts!) and chaired by podcast star Paul Boag, who expertly grilled the speakers while keeping the whole event bouncing. It was an outright success. Here are my take home points:

• Talk 1: Mark Norman Francis (Yahoo!), The Browser and Before. Basically, a brief history of the web from ARPANET to AJAX. Take home point: The web has been in a state of flux since it began, it’s the norm, and as web developers it’s our job to embrace that change and keep up with it.
• Talk 2: Chris Heilmann (Yahoo!), Sharing the joy - building badges for distribution. An excellent talk informative at a high level around the merits of distributing your data (better search engine lovin’, lack of single point of failure, exposure to wider audiences - 70% of YouTube traffic is outside its own domain) and low level coding (take a progressive enhancement approach to your widget’s code snippet by including a div, an anchor tag for search engines and a script tag instead of just a script tag). Take home point: a 3-level distribution strategy (badge, widget, API) is the way to go now and for the future, but there are important dos and don’ts at each level. Read around before committing. More on Chris’s blog.
• Talk 3: Gareth Rushgrove (Freelance), A First Class Web Citizen. This was a collection of suggestions for improving the compatibility of web apps. Take home point: APIs and URLs are interfaces just like traditional UIs and should actively be designed as such, with ease of use and speed of understanding being the goals. Blog post here and slides on Slideshare here
• Talk 4: Chris Mills (Opera), The Mobile Perspective. Information and advice on the issues surrounding mobile browsing and the types of mobile browsers. Take home point: multi-handset testing is the key to success (don’t just focus on the iPhone!). Testing effort can be reduced by clustering handsets by browser.
• Talk 5: Aral Balkan (Singularity08), Bare-naked Flash: Dispelling Myths and Building Bridges. A talk by one of the leading members of the Flash community on how Flash has grown up a lot and should be given a second chance by those who’ve written it off in the past. Take home point: Issues such as bookmarking, deep linking, back button problems, accessibilty, integration with other technologies and SEO that have plagued Flash in the past are no longer problems. Blog post here
• Talk 6: Simon Willison (Freelance), Comet: Moving towards a real-time web. An introduction to Ajax’s cousin, Comet: a technology that allows data to be pushed from server to browser (e.g. for chat). Take home point: Comet exists, is more efficient than polling, is used by Gmail and Meebo, and there are libraries to make it easy to use.

All in all, I found the whole event pretty useful and as always (like with the Refresh events) it’s great when the Edinburgh web development community comes together.

As for data being more important than your website, can Hubdub be the web’s repository for predictions?

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