Tag Archives: state of the browser

Work

September 2023 month notes

I tried the Kitten framework as I was quite surprised to see it request permission to change my privileged port permissions on install. I had to read through the post and its related posts before I realised that the nature of restricted ports is so ingrained in my I never asked whether it was genuinely a security risk to have them accessible from userspace. I would recommend taking a look through the posts linked to from the above post because when I realised that often my answer to port restrictions is to sudo onto them and that is a bit of weird way of not actually being secure.

I haven’t done much with Kitten, just working my way through the tutorial. The static serving is fine, the dynamic pages are a bit odd and the default ability to retain server state feels very odd.

I’ve also been continuing to try and learn Koa although if this wasn’t related to work I wouldn’t be bothering. Taking a look at the State of Javascript indicates that Express is the runaway winner and all other frameworks are pretty esoteric.

As an aside the state of in-page linking in the State of Javascript is embarrassing, the page structure is really complicated and doesn’t seem able to assign a simple id to a section tag.

Koa is from the school of “everything is a plugin” so out of the box it is completely anaemic and you have the zero-joy experience of trying to figure what libraries and plugins you should use. Most of the core plugins haven’t been updated in years, which is good in terms of stability but makes it hard to understand which libraries are actually unmaintained and which are fundamental. I much prefer the Python approach of having batteries included but being able to swap things out if you have particular needs.

One thing that Koa does differently to Express is to use a combined Context object instead of explicit request and response objects. I don’t think that is really very helpful and I did manage to mix the concept up with Go Contexts. Koa contexts are just a big ol’ object that includes some default values and the response kind of magically fires after all the middleware has fired. I feel it is a bit of step backwards in terms of clarity. My guess is that it makes it easier for plugins to add functions into the context object rather than having to explicitly import them and use them within the handler code.

I’m building a basic old school webapp so I needed some templating and that was a bit of journey in terms of what is popular but Nunjacks is work-friendly and based on jinja2 so it feels very familiar.

I’ve been slowly continuing to replace my various Python database libraries with a simpler and faster set of string queries executed through psycopg3. Next on the chopping block is Pony, which while it is relatively enjoyable as an ORM is needlessly clever in its use of generators and lambdas to do queries. I found a broken query and despite reading through the documentation I couldn’t fix it. If you already know SQL an abstraction has to be pretty powerful to be worth the overhead on things like queries which are fundamental a string and a map of data bindings and not much more.

I attended the State of the Browser conference this month and it was a good edition that balanced the input of practicioners, browser makers and had practical technical advice and reminders. It also managed to limit itself to only one non-technical related talk. I’ll write up a few notes in a separate post but this felt like a great return on the time invested.

I also discovered Rosie Pattern Language this month, a parser based alternative to regular expressions, I was intrigued but it lacks a helpful tutorial or introduction article so it has gone into the backlog to investigate later.

I started reading the book The Logic of Failure this month and I’m about halfway through it. It is a fascinating read and describes a series of experiments done with computer simulations of various situations from a town, a sub-Saharan ecosystem to a fridge with a broken thermometer. The outcomes are then mapped to the participants voiced thoughts to try and identify patterns of behaviour and the underlying rationales that drive them. Obviously the goal of reading such books is to try and temper the causes of failure in yourself but some of the problems the book highlights such the behaviour of complex inter-related components and exponential behaviour are just things that all humans are bad at.

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Web Applications

State of the Browser 2014

I haven’t been to State of the Browser before. It is a very cheap one day conference during the weekend on the topic of web standards and the web in general.

Conway Hall, the venue is a beautiful place and very recommended. However the grand aura of humanist lectures did remind you how lame most slide-based presentations are. Shut out the light, we can’t see the cat gif!

The theme and topics of the conference are vague and therefore there was a lot of variety in the talks. More than half were coming from professional vendor advocates and while slick and enjoyable there was a palpable sense of yearly objectives being ticked off. Community communication, check; reminder of organisation mission, check. The rest of the talks were pretty crappy though so its not all roses in the community either.

I’ve put down a few immediate reaction thoughts but I thought I would try and formulate some general takeaways.

Firstly the meaning of the web is very vague, there was an attempt to formulate the meaning of a “web platform” but it floundered a bit. The difficulty is not really what is the web, which is fundamentally unchanged since its inception, but rather what are all the companies doing when they try and build and expand on web?

Essentially what do browser vendors talk about when they talk about the web? To them the web is the input that the browser will accept. Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google were all represented along with Telefonica who are making a big bet on Firefox OS.

One key theme was the belief that affordable smartphones (say below £50 to by and presumably close to £10 a month to run) are imminent and they will herald a new wave of traffic and content consumption. I feel that broadening on-demand access to the web is a good opportunity but the value of this audience, beyond hopefully buying data plans that are more expensive than talk minutes and text bundles, was utterly unproven and seemed an issue of no concern to the speakers.

One interesting thing about web development is that it is a place where visual design, technology and content creation collide into one huge grope box orgy where everything gets mixed up with everything else.

The visual design of the web was mentioned more than a few times and a lot of the standards work was essentially about delivering more fidelity to conceptual designs. It’s interesting that this is seen as fundamentally good thing rather than being interrogated. Perhaps it was discussed in earlier years.

There was also an interesting division in what people saw as their responsibilities. Javascript is now sufficiently complex that there is stratification and specialisation even with this niche. “Glass” people do UX, HTML and CSS, Javascript people do MVC “backend” work and performance and literally no-one is thinking about how the server could make any of this easier.

There was a dispiriting sense from a technology perspective of people hitting everything in sight with a golden hammer made of HTML/CSS/JS. About a fifth of the things discussed on stage boiled down to “a written standard for accessing OS capabilities based on an implementation of that standard”. It makes you appreciate things like Linux where there is pressure to actually tackle root problems and needs rather than layering hack on hack. The acceptance of the diabolic state of touch detection is an example, leading to the suggestion that you should progressive enhance on the detection of mouse events. I mean after all why use a filesystem abstraction when you could just iterate over /dev yourself?

The same paucity of leadership came up on the issue of HTTP 2 where it became clear that the vendors regard it as a way of dealing with the overhead of HTTP connections not really as a way to create the right kind of networking for the new activity we want to perform online.

It was also nice to see not one but two “standards” for defining viewport relative sizes: vw in the viewport spec (which seems very sensible and progressive by the way) and w in the picture/srcset responsive images standard.

There were a few moments when people seemed to touch on a better way of doing things, for example, declarative programmatic rules for layout; but these were rare. Maybe it’s just not that kind of conference.

In terms of talks the clear standout was Martin Beeby’s talk on what the Internet Explorer team have been doing to remove bottlenecks from their rendering. Most of the stuff was sensible and straight-forward but the detail on GPU interaction was fascinating, particularly on picture loading.

One massive problem with the conference was the weird idea that speakers weren’t going to take questions after their talks. Martin mentioned that buffers between the browser and the GPU were small and I would have loved to have know whether than was an intrinsic limitation or not. The lack of ability to follow up on issues diminished the utility of all the talks.

Other than that the walkthroughs of specifications of viewport, service workers (particularly the caching API) and the picture tag were all helpful. Andreas Bovens’s talk also had a helpful review of pixel density and its new related units.

The talks were filmed, I have no idea whether they will posted at some point but those are the ones I’d recommend.

The ticket was very cheap but the main issue of the conference was the time it takes. The programming is very baggy, I felt if all the talks had been halved in length and the panel discussion chopped to make room for post-talk questions there would have been a really good long afternoon of material.

I’ll probably give it another go next year but be a bit more ruthless about what talks to attend.

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