jQuery conference 2013 Europe Vienna review (part 1)

So the jQuery conference Europe 2013 in Vienna (Austria) has started. We were welcomed by Richard D. Worth which is a board member of the jQuery team. Followed by an introduction to how to build jQueryUI plugins to take advantage of the new WidgetFactory. I’m going to focus this post on the hot topics of the first presentation.

jQuery is now 7 years old, Richard pointed out that 55.7% of all webpages now use jQuery, and if you exclude from this group pages that don’t use JavaScript then it is used in an astonishing 90.7% of all webpages!

Part of the news is that jQuery 1.9.1 is out and it now supports a load more of stuff, such as CSS3 selectors, except those that would demand too much event handling. It was also noted that apparently there are lots of sites that link to the “newest” jQuery out there and  when jQuery 1.9 became the latest one thousands of sites got instantly broken.

Some breaking news that popped out: jQuery is going to DROP SUPPORT FOR OLDS INTERNET EXPLORER (6,7 and 8) !!! in it’s 2.0 (big applause from the audience).  It should be noted however that IE9 and IE10 are much more standards compliant so they will be automatically supported.

It was also presented the new jQuery membership (which will go on beta soon). Member ship will be available for both companies and individuals. Companies get website recognition, conference benefits and some other perks. Individual members will also get a bunch of annual gifts depending on the contribution, although everybody always gets something just by being there.  These include: stickers, buttons, tshirts, hoodies, bags, you always get something different. If you are interested in participating shoot an email to be a beta tester: membership@jquery.org

I’ll try to post more about the conference (or acquired knowledge later). Follow me on facebook (more active) or google plus (less active) for more updates and photos.