Hitchhiker's Guide to Web Standards:
Pittsburgh Edition.

<prologue>

About me..

@briankardell

The jQuery Foundation...

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

TL;DR

• Standards are great and we hate them.

  • Why they matter and we love them

  • Why they suck and we hate them

• They are changing: SDO wide, world wide, this is happening.

  • It's hard to turn th boat 

• Developers in Pittsburgh have a role to play - if you want it.  

  • Thanks to JQuery Foundation, Code and Supply, and Bearded.

...it begins very simply.

It begins with a house.

</prologue>

A Westinghouse.

(see what I did there?)

The Land Before Time...

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

― Douglas Adams

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

Brakemen

Nothing seems to work together and no one agrees on anything

Format Wars

Web

DOM / Box Tree

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

PNG

SVG

MPEG

OGG

HTTP

TCP/IP

{Electrical}
{Metallurgical}
{etc}

We 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

No standard for standards

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

Whales
and
Herding Cats

Who is this God Person Anyway? - Douglas Adams

"So this is it," said Arthur, "we're going to die."
 

"Yes," said Ford, "except ... no! Wait a minute!" he suddenly lunged across the chamber at something

behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" he cried.
 

"What? Where?" cried Arthur twisting round.
 

"No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after all."

- Douglas Adams

Speeds:
OMG slow
WTF Fast Experimental

Unimpressed Marcos is unimpressed.

Note...

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

― Douglas Adams

The Adjacent Possible

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

We have a hulk.

2011: jQuery Standards Team

 

2013:  EWM

the <main> point

I'd like to <addr>

Dropping the F-Bomb on Web Standards

2014-2015:
Turning the Titanic

Broken Economics

2 reasons why even when you technically "can" participate, you can't:
 The second one will shock you.

2016:
Incubation,
JQuery
Chapters.io
& Pittsburgh.

Goals of Chapters

Let's fix the broken economics:
easier to be involved / real value now.

Let's look at the slang in less intimidating, more local ways.

Let's develop ways to coalesce and coordinate feedback

The more you know...

examples close to my <3

• Custom Elements <3<3<3
• * Houdini *
• DOM Token Lists
• Keyboard modality
• Inert
• panels and panelsets