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...
#extendthewebforward