March 13, 2012 | Aaron Bramwell

After nearly five days of SXSW Interactive, it's easy to feel a bit of information overload. I wasn't able to attend every development-related talk that I wanted, but I did make it to several, some of which were quite good. Here's a rundown of some of the better ones, and some of the thoughts/ideas I've come away with.

The State of Browser Developer Tools:

Even though Firebug and Chrome's Web Inspector are tools I use so regularly, there were still some tricks I learned here that I had somehow overlooked. An example would be Chrome's appcache control, which makes building offline apps and webpages much easier to test. Some other notable tools:

IE 9/10 Developer Tools

IE's Dev Tools are not quite near Firebug or Web Inspector, but they're getting close. One nice feature is a way to easily revert your browser all the way back to IE7 for testing. No longer are virtual machines or hacky software necessary to run test in multiple IE versions on one machine.

Cache Manifest Validator

Cache manifest files are great for ensuring some offline functionality, at least in the smarter browsers, but any small syntax error anywhere in the file will cause the whole thing to break. Here's a validator to make sure that doesn't happen.

Opera Mini Emulator

I had no idea this existed, and I've since tested it out a bit and it seems cool. The Opera Mini Emulator allows you to test the Opera Mini browser inside of ~20 or so popular phones with different resolutions and whatnot.

CSS.next: Current Experiments, CSS4 and the Future

This panel had some folks from the CSS working group, a developer from Mozilla, and standards evangelist Lea Verou. Overall, it was fascinating to hear where CSS is going, and the painful work the working group is doing to move CSS into a more intelligent language for web applications. Unfortunately, a lot of the cooler stuff like CSS Regions and Flexbox still have a long way to go before there's sufficient browser support for them. One interesting piece of information from the CSS working group is that they ultimately want to grow CSS into a more powerful and programmatic language, and that they are looking to existing CSS preprocessors like SASS for ways to make this happen. This is great news for developers using SASS, since it suggests that one day the SASS-style code you're writing now may one day be a web standard.

Excessive Enhancements: JavaScript's Dark Side

Amongst all of these talks that going on about the latest and greatest web technologies, it's nice to hear one that asks us to maybe reel in our enthusiasm a bit and ask ourselves if we really need these tools. Phil Hawksworth calls out some web sites/applications that completely fail without JavaScript, even when an appropriate fallback would not have been that difficult to build. His discussion of how so-called "hashbang" URLs (*cough* Twitter *cough*) are ultimately a bad things for the the web, especially when the HTML5 History API now exists so that we can navigate without pageloads in a way that doesn't mangle the URL. The Levi Routes Library is a great tool to build your apps the right way.

There were a lot of great talks, these were just some of the better ones that really stood out. I learned a lot, had a great time, so all in all SXSWi 2012 was a great success! Alright, back to the real world…