(I meant to post this the weekend after the conference, but between me coming down with the lurgy, and then my server having some issues, it's taken me until now to get my shit together)

On March 12th I had the pleasure of attending Clearleft's latest conference, Web Day Out, in beautiful Brighton.

Billed as "A one-day event all about what you can do in web browsers today!", it was a day dedicated to the web platform itself. No frameworks, just the vanilla web. HTML. CSS. And a smattering of Javascript. My favourite things.

And this was excellent timing, given we've nearly finished the migration of Pulse to a good old "boring" HTML/CSS frontend. We made a conscious decision during the migration away from the previous Wordpress/React site to make the minimum amount of changes, focusing primarily on the performance and accessibility improvements we could make on the way.

But now we're at the end of that phase we will start looking at all the other improvements we can make, and I was super eager to refresh my knowledge of the web's latest tricks.

After introductions from Jeremy, the day kicked off with Jemima Abu in a high-energy talk about how to use as little javascript as possible. Jemima demonstrated native HTML features such as accordions using the <details> element, and dropdown menus with Popover API, all with humour and an excellent use of memes, a favourite of mine was the comparison of the "left-pad incident" to Thanos's "Snap".

Next was Rachel Andrew, with a guide to using Baseline effectively. I've been lucky to see Rachel speak many times during my career, and I'm always in awe of her ability to clearly and concisely explore a topic.

Aleth Gueguen talked about building an offline-first multi-page progressive web app for use while out sailing on the ocean. I can't imagine a more hostile R&D lab! Offline first, serve from the browser cache, store data in indexedDB, don't try and manage state, just persist everything through the URL. This gave me flashbacks to the days of working for whales.org and prototyping something similar using CouchDB and PouchDB.

Harry Roberts went off on one about javascript front ends, and it was glorious (especially given the aforementioned migration). Some choice (paraphrased) quotes for me were:

• Going against the grain of the web has a cost, a literal cost.
• It is developers that make websites slow.
• If you can list more than one page of your site, then why are you trying to make it an SPA?

It was Manuel Matuzovič's birthday, so we sang for him. Then he showed two very interesting projects, oli.css a classless base stylesheet with some very interesting configuration options, and UA+, a new type of user agent focused reset

Richard Rutter is another person I've had the pleasure of seeing speak numerous times now. I always pick up so many typography tips from his talks. Whenever I wonder why a design isn't quite there yet, or I feel like it needs some extra polish, I always think "What would Richard do?".

jake jake Jake Jake Jake Jake JAKE JAKE JAKE Archibald (you had to be there) gave us the story behind the long long road to having a customisable <select> element, and all the features that had to be in place to make it happen, including anchor positioning and popovers.

Lola Odelola finished the day by walking us through the standards process using an imaginary media query prefers-alt-text. I'd seen Lola speak previously at All Day Hey! last year, and this talk was a followup to her exploration of alt text as a space for art and creativity.

This was another fantastic conference from the Clearleft team, and one that I hope is repeated next year. It is absolutely incredible what you can do in the browser these days, and even though I thought I was keeping up with the latest developments, it astounded me how far things have come.