The Days Of Web Standards - Event report from Tokyo, Japan

On July 15th and the 16th in Tokyo, Opera Software participated an event for Japanese web developpers named "The Days of Web Standards". I blogged about it on the Japenese Choose Opera blog, here it is in English.

- Photo album of "The Days of Web Standards
- The original event report in Japanese

The first day

July 15th Sunday Akihabara UDX 6F Room 9

We had an Opera booth in conference Room9 in UDX Akihabara (which is famous town for Japanese electrical gadgets and Otaku culture). The W3C Keio had a booth on the right hand side and Mozilla Japan had one on the left. (Mozilla later moved to another location)

We put four A0 size posters for the back side wall and displayed several devices with Opera installed on them for demonstration. We showed off the Nintendo Wii Internet Channel, Sony mylo, Opera Mobile installed on the KDDI AU PC Site Viewer, E-Mobile Win Mobile device EMONE, Opera Widgets, and of course the Opera Desktop. At our booth we also handed out Opera brochures and Opera stickers.

We prepared those four posters for the event, the two posters originally designed for SXSW in Austin last year which we translated the English text into Japanese. We had another two posters designed for this event. The main Japanese poster read "Play the Web" with on our local web site URL jp.opera.com.

In the conference room, there were four popular sessions, which over 200 people attended on each ones. We were a big attraction for those people. Many of them came and saw our Opera installed devices for multi platform web browsing.

Session: Opera Widgets created with Web Standards Technologies - Semi hands-on training

For Opera this session was a highlight on the first day; one of our Swedish developer Hefa had a presentation with the title above at conference Room7 in the Dai Building Akihabara. The content was mainly re-arranged of a former event named "CSS Nite Widgets special in Tokyo" last month. He demonstrated to the attendees how to develop Opera Widget with his live coding.

The sample widget was a "Chat widget" with his Ajax Messaging Library. Before the event, we had planned to play with one of the attendee's laptop PC via wireless LAN and the sample chat widget. Although mostly people didn't bring their own laptop PC, in addition there were issues with the wireless LAN connection. The good thing was we could spend enough time for Q&A session talking about Opera Widgets involved with our CSO Charles. In total, our session lasted 90 minutes.

• The main presentation material about Opera Widgets in Japanese
  　-> Open with Docufarm
• Hefa's material and sample source code
• Ajax Messaging Library

The second day

July 16th (Monday - Japanese national holiday) Akihabara UDX 6F Room 10

We moved our booth to another area on the same building because the conference rooms Room10 and 11 of the second day were different from the first day. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to take a photo, but our booth over there got much more traction than in the previous location.

Session: Opera - Web standards everywhere - Open Web standards on any devices

Our CSO Charles had a presentation at Room11 in the UDX Akihabara with the above title. There were over 40 attendees who came to watch our web standardization activities and the future web technologies which we are trying to implement to Opera.

In terms of the web standardization works, we normally talk about W3C's activities in Japan. Though he explained another important organization that makes fundamental specification of the Internet, such as IETF for several basic protocols (HTTP, Mail, TLS), OMA for mobile web standards, ECMA they are developing ECMAScript4, WHAT-WG is became famous for HTML5, and things like that. He spoke the inside story around those organizations and about its upcoming new specifications which they are discussing.

I will upload his presentation to the Web in the near future.

Panel discussion with Opera × Firefox × IE

This panel was the main attraction of the event. We participated with other browser vendors panel discussion with Mozilla and Microsoft. In the US, there was a similar event last year, but in Japan this was the first time having the session with the three major browser vendors (except Apple) all at the same panel.

From Opera, Charles, Brent (he is Opera's country manager of the Tokyo office) and me participated. Please read some of blog posts by the attendees. I thank the moderator, Mr. Kidachi from Mitsue-links, I think his task was very tough and the sessions was really successful. There were lots of people who came to watch. So many people came, that some didn't even had seats. Thanks to him and the attendees.

Dinner party with contest winners of Web Standard Coding

For the final enjoyment, we had a dinner party with our local contest winners of "Web Standard Coding" which was to applaud the Japanese web developers with high W3C valid coding skill.

That made me feel the kind of event is very good opportunity to communicate with them directly who are redeveloping Japanese websites day by day with Open Web standards technologies. I really respect them from bottom of my heart. We keep trying to contact them.

Opera always wants to support the type of activities and assist them forever. Let's create open and cool Internet with Web standards