Bruce Lawson

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    Bruce Lawson evangelises open Web Standards for Opera. He was previously content editor and technical lead for The Law Society and the Solicitors Regulation Authority websites.

    His degree is English and Drama – he’s fascinated by communication. He began converting his own site to HTML5 at Christmas 2008, and co-wrote the first book on HTML5, Introducing HTML5.

    He was a member of the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group at the W3C. He blogs at brucelawson.co.uk and is @brucel on Twitter.

     

     

    About Bruce’s session

     

    HTML5 101 for Content Specialists

    Bruce is an English Literature and Drama graduate who learned to code because he’s interested in code as a vehicle for communicaton. Bruce won’t focus on HTML5 code, but instead will focus on new features of HTML5 that content professionals should be aware of when they’re speaking with developers. Some are already well supported in browsers, some are just appearing now but, for those engaged in longer-term projects, are worth considering.

    He’ll introduce HTML5 structures called microdata that allow you to use information schemas developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex to improve the display of search results (and hopefully garner more visits).

    Web forms are never exciting, but there are some simple tricks that developers can employ to make forms easier to complete by visitors, which can lead to more sign-ups or more sales.

    He’ll show you some simple HTML5 tags designed to enhance the readability of right-to-left text (such as Arabic or Hebrew) in bi-directional content (that is, content that mixes left-to-right and right-to-left text) and which enhances the readability of Chinese, Japanese and Korean language content.

    He’ll also demonstrate HTML5 video subtitling, already supported in labs builds of Opera, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10, and you’ll see the simple format that allows you to easily add subtitling to video to make video accessible to those who can’t hear the audio, and which is fully indexable by search engines.

    What you will learn:

    - What HTML5 offers for content professionals now
    - How to maximise your SEO properly, without gaming the system or manipulating your content
    - What HTML5 is coming to browsers in the next 12 to 18 months