The web is a beautiful place. On the face of it: open to all. Complicated and yet still simple. Why do I still so strongly believe in the web? How can we help to keep the web a welcome and open place? What's different today that makes the web so much more exciting than ever?

"The Living Standard" is about living beyond the hype and the popular and what's fashionable. Being able to identify areas that don't work and improve upon them. Being able to continue to evolve and grow as we/I better understand our surroundings. Respecting each other, listening to each other, sharing with each other and learning from each other.

Story arc

Three parts:

  1. Previously: history of why I care, web standards: "Why do I still so strongly believe in the web?" The web allowed me to jump start my creative needs.
  2. Today: what we can do, how can we do it, socially and with our work: "How can we keep the web a welcome and open place?"
  3. Future: PWA "What's different today that makes it more exciting than ever?"

Successful content and posts

Misc notes

Title: Living Standard

Abstract: The web is a beautiful place. On the face of it: open to all. Complicated and yet still simple. Why do I still so strongly believe in the web? What's different today that makes the web so much more exciting than ever? And how can we help to keep the web a welcome and open place?

  • Web standards
  • Not the latest technology
  • But also the latest technology
  • Don't be afraid to try things (though sometimes I am)
  • What does the future look like.
  • Why am I excited? It's taken years to get to the realisation that PWAs get us
  • Social standards, more people learning to code, more support groups, more diversity, giving people oppotunities that wouldn't normally have the chance
  • We're in a privilidge position, so we should use that to help others. To raise their voices.

SDKs

When I was younger, during the early 90s, my dad had bought a Psion. It was an early Personal Digital Assistant - sort of like a really small laptop with a monochrome LCD display - but what interested me most was that there was a public Software Development Kit (SDK) available. The potential to create my own application.

I'd already dabbled in writing my own applications using Visual Basic, but really the BASIC part of VB allowed me to wire up UI components to actions. If I wanted to do something more interesting, or produce an application that wasn't 4mb (which would have to span over 5 or 6 720K floppy disks!), I would have to learn Visual C++, which for the 13 year old me just wasn't going to happen.

However, the Psion was significantly more simple than a PC (and the related VC++ libraries), so I figured I should be able to learn just enough to make my own Psion application.

I found the FTP address of the SDK, and started to download the zip file over my 14K modem…which, suffice to say, was a very long and expensive phone call.

When the SDK was finally down, I was presented with lots of interesting directories, and .c and .h files, and PDFs with lots and lots of documentation:

oodles of SDK documents

However, there was no spring board directly in. I had to first learn about compiling, then linking, and memory, and pointers and stuff and more stuff and (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻. So, sadly, the 13 year old me aborted after that long wait, and never actually wrote anything for the Psion.

SDKs require time and experience and the ability to gain knowledge. And of course, when the Psion eventually died out (and I suspect many of you haven't even heard of the Psion), the knowledge of the SDK is completely useless.

When I approached the web, had I been faced with an SDK, I probably would have struggled a lot. I wonder if an SDK was a requirement for getting content online, would the web be so successful? But that doesn't matter, because, the web has no SDK.

Of course, you can call projects like React or Ember or Angular an SDK, but it's neither the SDK, nor is it a requirement.

You do not need to use any prescribed technology or project to build amazing software on the web.

Look at Google Maps. If you were around when it first launched, it completely changed our standard expectation for maps on the web. This wasn't built "on the shoulders of giants".

I recently made my foray into React. The library is very good, and the complimentary tools like React Router and Redux make for a compelling software stack, it did feel very, very much like my Psion coding experience: to be productive, I'd have to know the SDK. Sure, that's acceptable, but to be creative, to tinker, I don't want to have to learn a new SDK. To tinker, I want to take what I know, pull things apart and play.

The web has no SDK.

Notes

Talk is broken into 3 sections (45 minutes, 15 mins per section):

  1. Background
  2. Current state
  3. What we can do/the future:

Story components (raw, unedited):

  • Introduction
  • History of how I got into working on the web
  • Using windows shell scripting in the browser
  • Trying to download and understand the Psion SDK / learning Visual Basic and being limited by Visual Basic
  • My degree and the "Internet module", I had to know the Altavista search shortcuts!
  • view source: a massive resource for inspiration and creativity
  • open source, companies

Building for the web should be simple. It should be accessible to everyone. No prerequisites. I remember thinking years back that Netscape was so much better than IE at the time because it was a smaller executable size, and that Netscape was better because it would require you to write strict html (back when table layouts were the only option, that shit had to match up).

But I was wrong. Internet Explorer was larger because it dealt with more complicated situations. It would render badly written html (tables in particular wouldn't break the page if the tags didn't match up). This meant mistakes were okay. They are. We're human. We make mistakes. It's how we get better at what we do.

If I'd constantly been presented with a white screen because my code didn't work [this is akin to today's practises] then I probably would have given up. As too, I suspect, would many others.

Why am I excited for the future?

Progressive Web Apps. A term coined by Alex Russell and Frances Berriman. By itself, it means very little, similarly to words like Ajax, comet or polyfill. However, with strong ideas behind it, progressive web apps (or PWAs for short), for me, is the precipice of over a decade of progress.

When I came to the web, I wanted to make applications. Windows shell scripting gave me some of that. Then JavaScript (to me: basically the same thing as WSH, just in the browser) gave developers the ability to manipulate web pages.

DHTML was an attempt to creative more interactive web sites. Then (via Microsoft and Google) Ajax and comet (web streaming) exploded the capabilities of sites, hand in hand with the popularity of libraries, jQuery in particular meant that programming for the web became easier for more people to access.

PWAs takes new browser APIs that have been evolving over the last few years, and joins them together giving us a software environment for first class applications with the ability to link to any other page or application on the web.

We're finally able to take our websites with us, instead of having to visit them.

Push notifications are hugely attractive to business as they consistently show to have higher engagement (citation needed) with users as they can push relevant and timely information to their users.

Service workers are the entry point to all this functionality, and are implemented by default as a progressive enhancement.

What do I stand for?

  • I believe that everyone should be treated fairly and equally. I want to be part of a system that encourages and creates situations that makes this true. I'm still working out how to contribute to this in a positive way. I think I always will be.
  • I believe the web is for everyone, and should be open to everyone. I think it's worthwhile to remind people that it can be simple to be creative on the web.
  • I believe, that the work I do, must be accessible to all.
  • I believe people are more important than businesses, and that they should come first.

Living Standard

I started writing Introducing HTML5 with Bruce Lawson in 2009. The WHATWG HTML5 specifications were nearly complete. In the following years, the W3C also started

On Privilege

Privilege, to me, was always a "bad" word. If I heard the word, my mind would zap back to when I was a kid, and hear my mum say something like

you privileged ungrateful little shit*.

  • I'm pretty sure she never said that, but time does a great job of screwing with my memory :)

But still, privilege was very much linked to selfishness to me. Quite often it is in practise. For the longest time, I took my privilege and kept it to myself. It helps that I'm a white guy with access to technology, education and safe living.

But in the last 5 years or so, I've started to realise that my privilege can help others. Either through direct support (like donating to causes that help others), or indirectly by raise other people's voices. A simple retweet, rather than adding my own commentary, is giving someone access to an audience they perhaps wouldn't normally get (and at the same time, I'm wary this could also do harm…).

I run a conference with Julie Sharp, my business partner and wife. We decided last year that we would start a diversity programme. We don't announce who has been accepted, nor is there any financial or business benefit. It's just, a good thing to do. We have the access to funds, we have the privilege, so we can share that with others.

Introduction

During 2009, I had the pleasure of co-authoring Introducing HTML5 with my good friend Bruce Lawson.

In the following years, the WHATWG announced that the HTML5 specification would move to a living standard.

What this means in practise is that it would reflect real world use. Not an ideal, not a single individual's view on what HTML5 should be, but what's really going on out there in the world.

What is the "living standard"?

We have to be the living standard. If you're reading this, or listening to this, then it's likely you're doing so to learn something, to somehow further your own knowledge. That's the first step, but it's not the last.

If you find yourself inspired, I want you to share that with someone else. Share your new found knowledge, or your experience. And keep doing so.

To measure myself against a living standard, I need to keep listening, and keep trying to hold back my judgement. I need to be open to new ideas and different ways. Just because something is not true for me, it doesn't mean it isn't true for someone else. I must always remember this.

I must, and I hope you will too, continue to evolve as the web grows and more people join it both to produce and to consume.

This is true for both technology, but also, and possibly more importantly: socially.

I believe that everyone should be treated fairly and equally. I want to be part of a system that encourages and creates situations that makes this true. I'm still working out how to contribute to this in a positive way. I think I always will be.

The web is a places where anyone can contribute anything.

No one has a right to tell you that you can't build complex software without a JavaScript library or framework.

No one has the right to tell you that you need X build system or Y pre-compiler.

No one has a right to tell you that you must learn a abstraction of a language like CSS or JavaScript to be able to do a good job.

It's nonsense. They may think that, but it's not true for someone coming to the web anew.

When I think of the web, I think of an open web. A free web. A web that, as it was intended, links from one place to another. That all powerful feature of the web: links. The humble anchor pointing from one quiet corner of the web to another.

This is important. This is worth fighting to keep it alive.

Drafts may be incomplete or entirely abandoned, so please forgive me. If you find an issue with a draft, or would like to see me write about something specifically, please try raising an issue.