In two weeks today, we will be launching Go Test It at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London. We’ve been on TechCrunch, I’ll be speaking/demoing on stage for 5 minutes, will be grilled by ‘dragons’ Reshma Sohoni and Mike Butcher, and we’re going to have an exhibition stand. The excitement is building up!
Of course we’re getting flyers, business cards, T-shirts and a poster printed. But if you’ve ever been to an event like this, you’ll know the information overload which overwhelms visitors there. How do you increase your chances that someone will remember the awe-inspiring demo at your stand, or remember the good helpful conversation with a friendly member of your team?
I was discussing this with Rahul Vohra, who will be joining me at the Go Test It stand at FOWA. Rahul pointed out that maybe not everybody realises just quite how many functional differences there are between web browsers, and thus how valuable Go Test It is by allowing you to test a range of browsers automatically.
So Rahul came up with a great creative idea: give people a practical example of a page which behaves differently in different browsers! And with the help of the excellent QuirksMode and a presentation by John Resig, I selected twelve different cross-browser issues, and created a short JavaScript snippet which illustrates each one.
Each code sample is 100% valid HTML, and pops up an alert; the alert shows a different text in different browsers, and a comment at the bottom of the file tells you the result you will get. Thus we get twelve different flyer designs; see this one for example.
I love the geek appeal of this design: we want you to take it back to work, show your coder friends, ask “hey, did you know that…?”, have a good laugh, and pin it to your wall.
The other side of the flyer is a straightforward overview of Go Test It’s main features and benefits. So if you’re sitting in the back of a session which turned out to be less interesting than anticipated, you have something nice to read.
We’ll be in the exhibition area of Future of Web Apps on 1st and 2nd October, and I’d love you to come around and have a look at our cross-browser difference challenges. I bet that amongst the 12 we’ve got at least one or two weird issues that you didn’t know about!