Tag Archives: web standards

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2023: Year in review

2023 felt like a very chaotic year with big changes in what investors were looking for, layoffs that often felt on step away from panic, a push from business to return to the office but often without thinking what that would look like and a re-evaluation of technical truisms of the last decade. So much happened I think that’s why its taken so long to try and process it: it feels like lots of mini-years packed into one.

A few themes for the year…

Typescript/Javascript

So I think 2023 might be the year of Peak React and Facebook frontend in general. I think with Yarn finally quiet-quitting and a confused React roadmap that can’t seem to pose a meaningful answer to its critics we’re finally getting to place where we can start to reconsider what frontend development should look like.

The core Node/NPM combination seems to have responded to the challenges better than the alternative runtimes and also seem to be sorting out their community governance at a better clip.

Of course while we might have got to the point that not everyone should be copying Facebook we do seem to have a major problem with getting too excited about tooling provided by companies backed by VC money and with unclear goals and benefits. If developers had genuinely learned anything then they might be more critical of Vercel and Bun.

I tried Deno, I quite liked it. I’d be happy to use it. But if you’re deploying Javascript to NodeJS servers then Typescript is a complex type hinter that is transpiling to a convention that is increasingly out of step with Vanilla Javascript. The trick of using JSDoc’s ts-check seems like it could provide the checking benefits of Typescript along with the Intellisense experience in VSCode that developers love but without the need to actually transpile between languages and all the pain that brings.

It’s also good news the Javascript is evolving and moving forwards. Things seems to have significantly improved in terms of practical development for server-side Javascript this year and the competition in the ecosystem is actually driving improvement in the core which is very healthy for a language community.

Ever improving web standards

I attended State of the Browser again this year and was struck by how many improvements there have been to the adoption of new standards like Web Components, incremental improvements in CSS so that more and more functionality is now better achieved with standards-based approaches and how many historic hacks are counter-productive now.

It is easy to get used to the ubiquity of things like Grid or the enhanced Flexbox model but these are huge achievements and the work going on to allow slot use in both your own templates and the default HTML elements is really impressive and thoughtful.

Maybe the darker side of this was the steady erosion of browser choice but even here the Open Web Advocacy group has been doing excellent, often thankless work to keep Google and Apple accountable and pushing to provide greater choice to consumers in both the UK and EU.

Overall I feel very optimistic that people understand the value of the open web and that the work going on in the foundations of it are better than ever.

Go

The aphorism about chess that says the game is easy to learn but hard to master applies equally well to Go in my view. It is easy to start writing code and the breadth of the language is comparatively small. However the lack of batteries included means that you are often left with having to implement relatively straight-forward things like sets yourself or having to navigate what the approved third-parties are for the codebase you’re working on.

The fact that everyone builds their web services from very low-level primitives and then each shop has their own conventions about middleware and cross-cutting concerns is really wearisome if you are used to language communities with more mature conventions.

The type system is also really anaemic, it feels barely there. A million types of int and float, string and “thing”. Some of the actual type signatures in the codebases have felt like takes a thing and a thing and returns a thing. Structs are basically the same as their C counterparts except there’s a more explicit syntax about pointers and references.

I have concerns that the language doesn’t have good community leadership and guidance, it still looks to Google and Google do not feel like good stewards of the project. The fact that Google is funding Rust for its critical work (such as Android’s operating layer) and hasn’t managed to retire C++ from its blessed languages is not a good look.

That said though most projects that might have been done in Java are probably going to be easier and quicker in Go and most of the teams I know that have made the transition seem to have been pretty effective compared to the classic Spring web app.

It is also an easier language to work with than C, so its not all bad.

The economy

I’m not sure the economy is necessarily in that bad a shape, particularly compared to 2008 or 2001 but what is definitely true is that we had gotten very used to near-zero interest rates and we did not adapt to 5% interest rates very well at all.

It feels like a whole bunch of common-place practices are in the process of being re-evaluated. Can’t get by without your Borg clone? Maybe you can get by with FTP-ing the PHP files to the server.

Salaries were under-pressure due to the layoffs but inflation was in the double-digits so people’s ability to take a pay cut wasn’t huge. I think the net result is that fewer people are now responsible for a lot more than they were and organisations with limited capacity tend to be more fragile when situations change. There’s the old saw about being just one sick day from disaster and it will be interesting to see whether outages become more frequent and more acceptable for the associated costs.

Smaller teams and smaller budgets are the things that feel like they are most profoundly going to reshape the development world in the next five years. Historically there’s been a bit of an attitude of “more with less” but I feel that this time it is about setting realistic goals for the capacity you have but trying to have more certainty about achieving them.

Month notes

I started experimenting with months notes in 2023, I first saw week notes be really effective when I was working in government but it was really hard to write them when working at a small company where lots of things were commercially sensitive. It is still a bit of a balance to try and focus on things that you’re personally learning rather work when often the two can easily be conflated but I think its been worth the effort.

If nothing else then the act of either noting things down as they seem relevant and then the separate act of distillation helps reflect on the month and what you’ve been doing and why.

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Blogging

State of the Browser 2023

The State of the Browser conference is an annual staple for me (although it clashes with the excellent Pycon UK) and this year’s edition was another good day out. The logistics of the conference are great with live captioning on the talks, a live stream and the videos going online quickly after the event. If you attend in person then the new venue at the Barbican is comfy and well-organised, the only glitch being that the breakfast rolls (particular the vegetarian ones) ran out very quickly.

The keynote was a bit poor and rambly but did make a good point that of the top 100 websites none has completely valid HTML which seems crazy but also points to how hard it can be to create a complex website.

Amy Hupe‘s It all means nothing in the end was the only talk that was about personal experience rather than technology and I was grateful for that because at some conferences it can be a third of the content these days. The talk is absolutely fine, I don’t think it gets the definition of burnout quite right because the workplace is an integral part of the definition and therefore for a self-employed contractor I think you’re not really talking about burnout but about the expectations that you put on yourself. I was also interested that maybe people are only being exposed to OKR-style stretch goals at work now and maybe incremental ways of working, getting things done techniques and tiny habits are not as well known anymore.

Ian Lloyd‘s talk on UI accessibility horror stories was funny and it was very thought-provoking about how bad the theatre and cinema seat pickers are in particular that the accessible seating is not identified as such to assistive technology. However the second half of the talk lacked a bit of clarity about how to breakdown more complex UIs, in particular I was curious to know about how detail can be exposed progressively as needed.

Killian Valkhof’s talk on how common requirements can be met with pure standards-based techniques was the best technical talk of the day for me but it was absolutely blighted by a technical issue with the monitor connection. I hope he blogs about some the ideas he shared on the day because they are a lot simpler than a lot of approaches I’ve seen. I think the major takeaway from his talk for me was that our knowledge gets fossiled at the point we learn how to do something. It is harder to relearn something with new techniques than to learn a new thing altogether.

Diego González was the only representative of a browser maker this year, this input if vital to the conference so it would be great to have something from Mozilla in future years. His talk about PWAs involved an extended pastiche of Blue Planet which was amusing but I didn’t take that much away from it on a personal level. It is interesting to know that there is some self-reflection going on about what constitutes a progressive web apps and what their right relationship with native apps is. As compere Dave Letorey said during the conference “the browser is the everything app” if you’re not attempting to create a platform capitialist business then how much do apps matter to you compared to access to services and information?

The talk on caching by Harry Roberts was a great overview of cache headers which are the kind of thing you think you understand but I appreciated the clarity that you can just delete everything except Cache-Control and ETag and then map the behaviour into Cache Control directives with ETags as a bonus if relevant.

The final talk was a technical demo that used the speech to text API that is built-in to browsers from Apple and Google but isn’t really a web standard. The talk highlighted the huge burden that is put on Mozilla to make this something that can geuninely be open and used across implementations. To be honest I’ve seen talks like this before and they are fun but I’m not sure that this was the right forum if there wasn’t going to be a discussion about the compromise that is required to share your voice data with tech giants.

Chris Ferdinandi provided pre-recorded inserts between talks which were very professionally done (as you might expect from someone who does it for a living). He ignited a new interest in Web Components in me. I had previously been a bit sceptical but now they are fully supported it feels silly to use even a microframework if there is a standard available.

The attendees were very friendly and the environment as attractive as ever and the tickets are really a bargain although there was an appeal from the organisers for people to buy the tickets early to avoid them being personally liable for the deposit. Another Saturday well-spent.

Finally a shout out to the makers of Invidious for making it easier to review the videos from the day in a logical interview than actual Youtube. I’m sure it can’t be long before it gets shutdown somehow.

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Previous reports

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Programming

State of the Browser 2022

I’ve attended a few of these conferences and have always found them helpful. This year it had relocated to the Barbican Centre with the food and drink area overlooking the beautiful Conservatory there, great choice as a venue.

The conference was a hybrid in-person/online event that I think could serve as a model for other conferences that seem to only be focusing on their return to in-person. Due to other commitments I wasn’t able to be at the venue all day and so at lunchtime I headed home and picked up a few of the rest of the talks on the livestream. It was great to have the flexibility and made the whole conference more accessible.

Talks-wise it was interesting as ever and a little bit less inward looking or niche interest that it has been in the past. There were the usual mix of upcoming standards and challenges in implementing them, how to apply techniques to the current broad mainstream of browsers and a little bit of evangelism for playfulness and environment impact.

One of my key takeaways was on this last point; using an image CDN that can do automatic content negotiation to use an efficient modern image standard has a huge carbon saving. It feels a bit crazy that so many companies are still serving fixed sizes and formats off things like Cloudfront and S3.

Bruce Lawson kicked off the event with a good historical perspective talk on the history of standards (and the struggle to create and maintain them) and brought the issues of standardisation through the search for technical solutions to the world of regulation and better digital policy. Engaging with law makers is a more realistic way to improve the online world that the search of technical solutions to social problems.

More practically we can hope that Apple will be compelled as a digital gatekeeper to allow competition on browser implementations on its platform and maybe even fund its Safari team properly to have better compatibility with the general web standards on iOS. I felt it was nice for a recognition that government organisations can be engaged and willing to listen and that progress can be made be working together rather than outside of regular power structures.

Probably the best talk I heard was “Be the browser’s mentor not it’s micromanager” by Andy Bell this talk neatly encompassed two major ideas: the first was the way that layout systems in CSS have advanced to the point where you are describing structure and allowing the layout manager to actually decide the rendering and secondly on how digital design approaches have managed to fall between the abstractions of the grid system and the precise layout of magazine style layout.

By leaning on the layout engines the amount of CSS we have to write is much more minimal than the micromanaging fussiness typical to component design systems. It is also more powerful and expressive, avoiding the overly complex muddle that is often associated with component style systems but also not going too far down the class frenzy of utility class systems.

Sophie Koonin taught me how to use the prefers-reduced-motion preference via the medium of late 90s website chaos. A good example of the mixture of fun and practical content.

I also enjoyed Alistair Shepherd‘s talk which had a few technical bits and pieces but managed to bridge the themes of the conference by wanting to create a personal website that first and foremost reflected his personal interests and then used the tech to deliver the vision he had for himself. Although the idea to have websites that vary according to the time of date is quite an interesting idea.

I didn’t catch the last few talks so I’m hoping to be able to watch them when they come to YouTube (or maybe some federated alternative!).

Overall still one of the necessary conferences to catch for web technology and now easier to engage with than ever before.

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Software

State of the Browser 2021

This is the first in-person conference I’ve been to since the pandemic and since it normally clashes with PyCon UK this is also the first State of the Browser that I’ve been too in a while.

As a high-level pitch for the conference it a chance to hear from standard makers and browser developers about their thoughts on the web, web standards and issues in web development.

The conference had an audience of probably a third of what I felt it had the last time I attended in person. There was not issue with distancing and you could add a stickers to your attendee batch to nix photography and to ask for people to keep their distance.

Usually the chance to socialise and network is a major part of the conference experience but once I was there I realised that I didn’t really want to spend the time required to get to know someone new while COVID is as prevalent as it is, not attend the generous post-conference drinks.

Which made me wonder why I was there at all. The answer, on reflection, is that being physically present meant that I was actually present for the talks as well. I’ve bought tickets for virtual events earlier in the year and I still haven’t watch the videos.

By physically turning up I did pay more attention and I did engage and learn more than I did virtually.

I found a few things about the conference frustrating though. Firstly a number of the speakers weren’t there and instead had recorded a talk so being at the conference ended up being a collective video watch without being able to control the video and skip the boring bits. Also there were no questions from the audience because that was being handled on Discord. Now most of my Discord is taken up with gaming because, y’know that’s what Discord pretty much is for the most part. So I wasn’t able to see that side of things because I didn’t have time to set up some kind of work account. But generally whether it was Slack or something else I kind of think having the questions on the conference chat meant that the talks were actually lectures and where the speakers weren’t that proficient with their delivery it made the talks more boring.

So at the end of the experience I have no idea as to whether my attendance was a good idea or not. I probably would have been distracted at home but at least I could have sorted out Discord and have watched the pre-recorded videos in a more comfortable environment (I certainly could of dodged the morning torrential rain).

But when there was a good in-person speaker it was great. Rachel Andrew was the standout for managing a review of the history of layout systems while also previewing the thinking of the standards groups. In particular drawing a fascinating line between the necessity of the contains CSS directive to the ability to be able to look forward to container queries. Stephanie Stimac shared similar insight into what the future may hold for the development of the Form elements and their backwards-compatible codification and customisation.

Alex Russell offered a rebuttal of the locked down mobile ecosystems from a capitalist perspective but failed to really offer remedies given that this overall is a capitalist failure.

In a totally different vibe Heydon Pickering did a talk about requiring people to switch off Javascript to read his blog. It was closer to standup and I did laugh out loud several times although trying to explain what made it funny and entertaining has proven highly difficult.

Rachel Andrew is one of the people behind Notist which a few people were using to share slide links. I hadn’t heard of it before and I can see it’s pretty handy compared to trawling Youtube trying to figure out if some talk you half remember has been posted there.

Overall I think it was worth the effort, I felt I got outside my bubble for a while and felt a bit more connected to the efforts that are still ongoing to safeguard and advance the web as a whole.

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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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