Hitchhiker's Guide to Web Standards:
Researcher's Edition

<prologue>

About me..

@briankardell

The jQuery Foundation...

jQuery, jQuery UI, Sizzle, Dojo, Grunt, Lodash, QUnit, PEP, requireJS, esprima, Standards Work

I love standards.
Standards are terrible*

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife.

Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

- Douglas Adams

* historically

</prologue>

1990's Standards

Who is this God Person Anyway? - Douglas Adams

Michelangelo's creation of the Semantic Web

Raphael's Working Group Meeting

Two Speeds:

1) Ludicrous Experimental
 

Whoops.

Original DNA

Text and Degradation

One Speed:

1) WTF Fast Experimental
2) OMG Slow

Flexbox:  A love story.

(I will pause while you weep)

2004

Standard Wales.

Consensus and Bargaining Power

And then there was this.

XML

XSL

XSD

XPath

XPointer

XLink

XQuery

RDF

SPARQL

XML-FO

XBL

XSLT

XForms

SOAP

WSDL

XMLP

XHTML

Standards

YAY!

My own frustrations,

it turns out are not unique.

Humans creating standards

Wait...

<aside class="history">

The Land Before Time...

There was a time before standards.

Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.

Interoperability:  Consistency is inevitable.

Lack of standards was a real trainwreck... literally, and figuratively.

</aside>

No standard for standards

• ANSI
• ISO
• IETF
• W3C
• ECMA
• WHATWG*
• Others

We can do better.
How?

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for

pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely

concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't

the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
 

-Douglas Adams

2011: jQuery Standards Team

 

jQuery gives you a voice.

2012
Ideas Coalesce
"Reform"

The Economics of Standards: Incomplete.

JSON... I choose YOU!

Our priorities are wrong.

We have businesses and tech companies and academia.

We have developers.

We have a hulk.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. 

Douglas Adams on a decade of standards

The Adjacent Possible

You're gonna have a bad time.

Prollyfill
 

Dropping the F-Bomb on Web Standards

Arthur stared into his beer.

"Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too

wrapped up in myself to notice?"

How?

2013:  EWM

• Involve developers and tighten the feedback loop.
• Prioritize primitives - excavate, explain the magic.
• Prollyfill/incubate
• Standards Orgs are more like dictionaries than startups. 

Re-imagining an Approach to Web Standards

Winning

Guiding priorities today
ECMA, W3C, WHATWG

Changing policies

Incubation

Still a problem.

That's where you come in.

Chapters

...though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly

inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper;
and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Why it's going to win...

A few examples 

• Custom Elements
• Headings
• Web Audio
• DOM Token Lists
• Regions
• Selectors
• Form "Requirements"
• Keyboard modality
• Geometry APIs
• Inert
• Guestures
• panels and panelsets
   

a little more in depth...

Panels and Panelsets

Inert

Focus Rings

#extendthewebforward