A Browser Basics talk, what concepts would you cover?

I am so pleased to announce that London Web Standards is organising State of the Browser (a conference on the Browsers and their new features) for the third year.

Last year was an amazing experience. For the first time I had given 100% not only to preparing a conference but also to run it during the day. I missed all of the sessions, except a couple, but I definitely enjoyed being there, it felt like being part of the future 🙂

One thing I noticed was that, while we put had together a very Browser-focused conference (by inviting Browser Representatives to talk about the new and upcoming features) a few designers were there and I hope that they were able follow the main talks. I am not implying designers might not be knowledgeable about browser/HTML/CSS but that I am the first one that is working with them on a daily basis but feels like she don’t really know what’s “under the hood” and that knowing this might actually help her improve her understanding of HTML, CSS, HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

So the other day I thought we could prepare whoever wants to come to the next State of the Browser to what’s ahead of them by putting together a “preparation event” the month before, at one of the monthly London Web Standards nights.

Since then, I’ve been trying to think what would a “browser newbie” need to know before she can attend State of the Browser. I wanted to watch all the past videos, but I also wanted to hear the opinion of our past speakers and of anybody who could help putting together what I think could be a very interesting and useful talk for anybody willing to learn more about how the browser and the technologies used in it work.

This is what I’ve got so far (taken from what seemed to me a very useful page http://taligarsiel.com/Projects/howbrowserswork1.htm

• The Browser high level structure
• The rendering engine 
  • The main flow
  • Parsing and DOM tree construction
  • HTML Parser
  • CSS Parsing
  • Parsing Scripts
• Render tree construction
• Layout (without going into all the CSS concepts like the visual models)
• Painting

Then I also thought of

• Local Storage
• Offline Cache
• Web Sockets?
• Geolocation
• Web Workers
• Security
• JavaScript on the Client side?

I would like to know your opinion – is there anything you would not cover, or anything else you would add? I would really appreciate your help 🙂