<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