 Okay, so do y'all know Hitchhiker's Guy the Galaxy? I'm hoping kind of rather. Okay So I'm calling this the researchers edition because you know about the book He submits this giant entry for earth and it gets cut down to two words mostly harmless and Unfortunately, I can't make it that short. So this is you get the long version So some prologue before we get started This is me at least without my contact or with my contacts I'm at Brian Cardell on Twitter and I'm gonna tell you a lot of stuff about standards I'm gonna tell you from my perspective. So I'm not gonna like introduce myself a whole lot because you'll learn about me But we can start with that all of these things are things we're gonna touch on and I'll give a shout out to the jQuery foundation The jQuery foundation if you don't know is a big foundation and it encompasses lots of projects Here is an incomplete list. It's just some that you might know and it involves standards work Which explains why I'm here talking about standards and I want to tell you that I love standards and I think that they're terrible or at least historically. They're terrible talk about that But it's not all depressing. There's a happy ending because most of the changes that need to happen to make standards better already have occurred and I That's a Herculean kind of accomplishment and that's thanks to people from organizations and developers all over the world and Good faith of standards organizations. So I'm excited about that and I want to tell you about it But then there's this other thing the next step there's this role for developers to play and that's you here in Pittsburgh Want to say thanks to code and supply and Bearded for helping organize that along with the jQuery foundation So about maybe the last third of my talk will be about that Okay, so let's kind of dive in So when we talk about standards with regard to the web these are really kind of the four big standards organizations There's ECMA Where a JavaScript is standardized. There's an IETF where like HTTP is standardized protocols There's W3C in the what wig? That's the question mark And things get rather confusing there, but pretty much everything else is there somewhere So we'll talk about that So this is me in the mid 90s with regard to standards When the web got started I was super into it and I especially like the part where they paid me a lot of money to make websites And when the W3C was announced it was gonna be headed by Tim Berners-Lee the guy who created the web And it was backed by all these big companies Microsoft Netscape IBM And it was hosted at MIT like MIT This was my vision of the future right Anything that they would have come up with I would have been like take my money just take take my money and give me that right But I don't maybe some of you even have that perception of standards so I Have this I've kind of grown what I think about them and along the way I Had like a lot of misconceptions so the first one was that somehow they're really special like they're It's like the school of Athens or somehow like they're almost godlike that there's this group of Benevolent beings on top of some mountain they're sitting around Thinking of the perfect answers that they'll inscribe into tablets of stone and like tell us how to do it That's not really how it works So if you have that idea in your head, that's not right I used to think that standards had two speeds and one of them was like really ludicrously fast Sometimes it feels like it's really hard to keep up But I learned over time that that's not standards. That's experience Part of the reason this is confusing is because we have historically done our experiments in the browser You'll see a long time ago people used to have a Length that said like you need to download it and explore you need to download nescape or maybe there's two lengths that go to different places And even like 10 plus years later You had this which is a different class of thing But it's confusing because here you have Apple Saying hey download this browser so that you can see all this cool new stuff in H&L 5 and CSS 3 but Nobody else was shipping that and the specs weren't even done. So is that really a standard? It's not right like it's an experiment That got really confusing for developers and Is I'm fortunate by this part of the original DNA of the web when Tim created the web He was thinking something really pretty different He thought that H&L wouldn't be what it is now that it was kind of like The least understanding bit of the platform that you could fall back to get text as a you know last resort And so if you're thinking that everything is text and one browser having a little bit more understanding than another It's not really a big deal. So you can degrade gracefully Tim's original proposal and his original browser. It had no forms. No images. No audio. No video. No scripting No styling it didn't have colors And so this became like baked into how we did the web In reality the web has only one speed. It's glacial. It is like oh my god slow I'm going to illustrate with not the worst case scenario. This is just a normal thing So this is flexbox If you have heard that flexbox is a good thing like a good story success story That's not true. If you've heard that's a horror story. It's not true either But you see this slide if you see the impression that flexbox took about seven years, which is like Raise your hand if you've ever had a project that you worked on for seven years, right? like This isn't this is not a norm, right? Like people don't typically work on a project for seven years before it's done, right? like you might have a project that continues for seven years, but to get to phase one you don't to wait seven years, but Now I'm going to pause while you all weep because this isn't actually the whole story this email is from 2007 and in it She's talking about a spec that was proposed for the same thing in 2004 Specs don't pop into being right you can bet that the true story of flexbox goes way back before even that and It's just shipping now raise your hand if you use flexbox like you regularly use it You know it really well. So like one and a half people It'll take another couple of years before everybody knows that they can use it and they use it and they start figuring it out So you're talking about maybe 15 to 20 years That is crazy pants, right? This isn't a typo Getting a standard is really improbable, right? and One of the reasons that's really improbable is because it involves people I Want to tell you a story like in a former life. I wanted to be a teacher and I Knew a preschool teacher and he was like great He gets kids so excited about anything and they would learn so much And he got this idea in his head that kids would really like whales because they're like these giant sea beasts, right? Like how can you not like whales so he got this a month? He spent putting together Information absorbing everything he could about whales and he sat the kids down in circle found that morning He said all right kids today. We're gonna learn about whales and Right away just like that one of the kids said my outlives in Wales and Immediately another one said Wait, is that a place is it far away is it across the ocean Do you have to take a boat? Can you take a plane? My family went to Florida and we took a plane and somebody else said do they talk funny there because my mom's friend Barb is from Texas and she talks funny And when you think about it all these things are actually a lot more relevant to those kids real lives Then some giant beast that lives in the ocean, right? And so he had to you know adjust and they talked about these things that were You know really important to these kids with these kids were really interested in And that's kind of analogy for standards Like you might think that you go there with some idea already fleshed out and perfect in your head And when you get there you find out that You're talking about whales instead of whales, right? And that's because we have to get consensus and There's also this concept of bargaining power where Let's say you join a standards organization and you want to get a standard pass Do you make a browser? That's a good question to know because if you do recall that you can experiment in the browser and then you can say Yeah, but it's part of her proposal And if you don't make a browser no matter how badly you want it you have to convince one of them that they need to Do it Because they can just not right And so you hit stalemates and then there was this When I six came out believe it or not if you've ever had to deal with it it seems terrible But at the time it was like the best browser on the planet And then they left they just like they they stay out of the game initially then they came in and they kicked But they gave 95 percent market share and then They disbanded the team so That stinks, but it's not just Microsoft because like really the whole world gave up on the web We have like everybody said, you know, that wasn't really what Tim was thinking It doesn't really work for apps. We think we can do a lot better. What this like semantic web We want like an app web and They decided to reimagine the future and if you know the mythical man life I don't know if maybe anybody's read that but the second system effect is what happened in W3C like they had a lot of success and They way overshot and they themselves may be thought of themselves as a little specially powered when really they weren't so all work stopped on HTML and a Group defected and created the what way and they continued work on HTML which is great except that Microsoft wasn't involved So if the guys who control 95 percent of the market aren't gonna budge How do you get there from here? I don't know who said this earlier, but this is the the Northeastern expression, right? You can't get here from there from here And so Maybe a decade into after my you know dangling the charity in front of my face I guess you could say that my like my Attitude towards standards had kind of softened, right? How are we going to get beyond where we were in 1998-2000? It seemed like it maybe wasn't even possible But clearly we did right because if you know we have HTML 5 and CSS 3 and stuff like that like how do we get there? So the way that we got there is because in 2005 very sharp coined this term polyfill And a polyfill is essentially a Way for developers to fake it, right? So if you want to use something in HTML 5, but your users only have IE 6 You can find a way to make those API's work in IE 6 Yay, you did it Except that HTML 5 is also terrible It also took way too long aspects of it are just awful Lots of it failed to come to fruition And so this is where I'm left at the time Sort of feeling like what is even going on here, right? It's seen so broken, right? But my own frustrations have turned out we're not unique lots of people were unimpressed and As we started talking we kind of got together and We got to sort of play the role of Jacob Marley to web standards and show them The past present and you know, this is this is the future if you don't Correct you know And kind of what we were saying at some level is We still don't know what we're doing creating web standards Like as a core message that was Not necessarily totally warmly received It seems a little blasphemous, right Maybe I Take you on a brief aside If I were to ask you what time is it right now in New York City Probably all of you would say well Brian It's 802 p.m. In New York and they're both Eastern Standard Time So it must be 802 in New York City and you would be of course totally correct Except that a hundred years 150 years ago you have been totally wrong When it was 824 in Pittsburgh over there It was 11 or when it was 1124 in Pittsburgh was 1148 in New York. There's 24 minute difference There were about 10,000 towns in the United States and all of them had their own official standard time And that's because there was a time before standards Including time itself was not standardized the way that we think about it As you can imagine if you have to do things at large scales like Control railroads and make sure that people catch their connections Yeah You can imagine though if you want to run trains and you want people to be able to connect from one train to the next train And you want to be able to make sure that you have trains using your lines and that maybe they're not doing this one Going east and one going west on the same track because I don't know that might be bad, right? Then kind of agreeing on what time it is is pretty fundamental. You need it and so trains Came along and they realized we need this and they created their own times. So we had Northern Pacific time which You say hey, there's 14 competing standards this crazy We need to unify them into one and you wind up with 15, right? That's exactly what happened it took another 30 years before we have the standard time we know today and Trains were actually one of the things that brought this on if you look at what happened here all these things started as discrete experiments We didn't know we're building a transcontinental railroad like we're experimenting right and what people found out pretty quickly as they began to Consolidate and they wanted to lease their lines to one another and everything is that that before standards. This was a train wreck Really simple things that you would take for granted today the USA. Come on. That can't be a thing Like there were no metallurgical standards and so as you ran one trains lot over another trains lines The rails would break they would to bridges would collapse there wasn't a standard width or height for them So when a foreign train came on your tracks, they would crash into the overpass or get stuck in a tunnel This is crazy stuff, right? Even really basic stuff like cars who couldn't hitch one things cars to another because they had different couplings But even if you could it wouldn't matter because they wouldn't fit on the same tracks They realized that they agreed on approximately nothing and as engineers had to face this reality They had to deal with it every day They realized that this is really terrible and really expensive and they started trying to convince people we need to work together and so In the early 1800s. This was a fringe idea, but people started to do it Okay, that's the end of my side Cool story what's it got to do with what we're talking about What it's got to do is that there's no standard for standards right standards is really really young It's about a hundred years that we've even been trying to tackle this problem And in that time we got a national standard and then that wasn't good enough. We got an international standard What more do you need? Right? We have two standards bodies. What more do you need and yet we have lots of them? The reason that we have lots of them is because the other one won't work right, so ISO The international standards organization They were geared around physical things and when it came to Software and networking it was clear that they didn't know what they were doing They spent more than a decade working on the ISO seven layer model for networking and it didn't happen Vince surf and some other guys left. They created the IETF. It works completely differently. We have the internet, right? Couple of decades later Tim Berners-Lee comes along and he says hey Eric this web thing Where would you take it? Well, I'll take it to the IETF. That seemed to work pretty well so he takes it to the IETF and you get first the Http standard and that goes over pretty well and then you're talking about URLs and well Tim has to make a lot of compromises to get that through and including some he's not real happy with and HTML and CSS or something like CSS. It's a disaster. They can't get it done They spend years trying to get it done and they can't So they created W3C which works again completely different Where he talked about how they went down some decade-long excursion into X everything land Trying to reimagine the web and that's how we got what way and Echma the JavaScript body when JavaScript needed to be standardized. Well, they had a Bevy of places they could have taken it already, but they didn't they took it to the European Computer Manufacturers Association Who recently decided that they wanted to work on standards and they thought maybe had a slight Microsoft bent to it So It's not Heretical or blasphemous and that's the case we had to make but we're saying we can do better than this right where we're at Is not good and we need to do better. The question is how So with given all that background. I want to switch back to Douglas Adams and he says 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 this problem But most of them involved the movement of small green pieces of paper which is odd because it wasn't the small green pieces of paper That were unhappy Standards have tried moving all the variables right the one thing that they really haven't figured out how it's happened to is developers which is odd because it is a developers who are so unhappy right like So in 2011 adios money you may follow wrote this excellent announcement on the jQuery blog announcing the jQuery standards team would be headed up by yahoo to cats and Paul Irish and The reason is to give developers a voice in the process so we can try to fix the problems that we're having So a lot of people came together and discussed a lot of things and Got this idea that we needed to reform. We created this extensible web community group to discuss some of those things and This is it's hard to explain but This is John Nash and beautiful mind the story in the movie is not really accurate This scene itself is probably entirely apocryphal, but I like this story. So I'm gonna use it anyway So he's in a bar with his friends and one of his friends Not one of his friends all of his friends say Recall your Adam Smith if you don't know who Adam Smith is he's kind of like the father of modern capitalist economics Recall your Adam Smith who said that the best result comes from when everybody acts in their own self-interest and John Nash Realizes wait a second. I Realize that this is what you're teaching us and this is like we're at Harvard and this is what you're teaching us, but Look at this in this situation. We're in right now. If everybody did what was in their own self-interest We would all get the worst result but if we were to act In what's our in our own self-interest and the larger self-interest then we get the best result and This kind of like what we said about standards like there's a lot of good things in standards like it's close You know, we're not saying it's just absolutely wrong just saying The economics are broken and here's an example of how economics are broken Recall that we spent a decade spending time on everything X and L. I want to put this into actual economic perspective We wasted 10 years Tons of developers like myself based our lives on that we sold it to companies we got companies to do things and You could say that probably Billions of dollars were spent going down that road and at the end of the day developers said Jason I choose you and what happened all that investment right that economics is broken and The reason is because our priorities are wrong, right? So for years Standards bodies have said hey, we have businesses and tech companies in academia But nobody said yeah, we have developers which is crazy because developers are the OP superpower, right? Like developers of the Hulk. They're the ones you need, right? Douglas Adams on a Decatur standards for a moment nothing happened and after a second or so nothing continued to happen So I'm saying this because I want to point out a really interesting thing. That's critical to this argument For literally a decade nothing in terms of the web browser's capability changed literally nothing But if you are on the web at the time you would know that your experience got so much better and if you were developing for the web you would know that your development experience got so much better and That has nothing to do with Standards innovating and that has everything to do with the fact that we figured out how to deploy the DNA, right? If we have the DNA available we'll find a way right this thing like you think I made this up probably But this is not Photoshop. This is a real thing. This is called a main wolf. It's not a wolf It's not a fox either But it's a canine and it's what happens when a canine evolves in tall grassland That thing is crazy looking right like if I asked you design the perfect fox or the perfect wolf It wouldn't look anything like that. That thing looks more like a deer, right? But if you give us the DNA we'll explore the possibilities When houses were wired for electricity it was for artificial lighting. That was what we were going to do with it There weren't appliances. There was nothing else to plug in. There was just lights. There were light bulbs. That's it and So but we gave us new raw materials and we said hey, I can do stuff with this So we did stuff with it and we created all these new appliances and everything and that created a whole new market where now Plugs have a role to play. I think that's pretty good. That's ugly. It's crazy But it was a necessary step on the way to get there So one of the things that we decided was if you do this you're gonna have a bad time We can't keep experimenting in the browser because it leads to all these problems, right? So you know what a polyfill is if you can if you can fill all the browsers that don't Implement something what if no browser implement something? Instead of you know shipping something in Safari and saying download this Why can Apple not do it in JavaScript and CSS and give you one file you can download That works on all browsers I don't know it seems kind of cool like if you've ever used jQuery or jQuery UI or You know ember angular like all these things work in all browsers like why can we not propose new features that way that should work I think That would allow us to tighten up the timelines because That example of flexbox isn't unique and I'll show you one of the benefits This thing the local link pseudo-class is first proposed 1998 Somebody do the math. I'm not that good with math, but as a long time ago, right? 1998 and It has popped in and out of like standards through the years like it was in CSS 2 and then it was in So I was in CSS 3 and then it was in CSS 4 and taken out and We can't get it, but I remember reading about it somewhere around 2000 and I was like hypes for it. I was like, yes, I need that thing and then every time it comes out. I go What happened? Why didn't we get that thing? So when we were talking about how a crawly fill might be a good idea I developed a probably filled first CSS that lets you build in a jQuery plug-in style a way to Support new selectors so we could test out ideas and you could actually use them and So I did this and I created it and I want I wrote test because I thought hey We could do like TDD like you could have an implementation. It already has the test What if it's accepted the browsers go to implement it tests are already there just go for it, right? That seemed like it would be a good thing, but When I did it I shot the test over to the editor because I was very proud of it, right? And the editor said no, that's not what it those are wrong And by the time I got it to where they're right. I went That's not what I thought it was at all and not just not what I thought was at all But I have no need for that thing, right? That thing is not worth anything. I don't want it That would be a lot better to know in 1998 don't you think like if we were to if I were to give you this in 2017 After we had spent tons of money on it and then nobody needed it whose purpose does that serve, right? So Another thing that we said is that there is actually other models for standardization that totally work a Dictionary for example doesn't have a group of people who sit on Mount Olympus and you know Create the language We create the language Dictionary editor's job is to find the language that we created When they hear something colloquially enough they go and look and they find all the references and they make sure all these people are Talking about the same thing they write down the definition and it enters the OED The OED is beautiful and colorful and it contains the entry for the F bomb Not the F word the F bomb like the F bomb is defined in the OED Which is kind of cool because people drop the F bomb right like I mean we can pretend it doesn't exist, but it does So The the real key here is that this thing about Dictionaries it rubbed some people the wrong way like maybe You're taking away their powers to create or something But you're not because we're saying you can you can contribute you can create with probably fills you can There's other things that you can do as well Let me tell you another story that Let's you know that this is not actually radical at all Some people might know that Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent hypertext hypertext is all around in fact hypermedia Which is kind of what we have with the web today. It was already like really popular Hypercard on the Mac was making games like mist when Tim Berners-Lee came along It just wasn't widely networked and Tim created this concept of a link and a network and everything He didn't invent angle braces or tags Those already existed. There was a an actual ISO standard something that passed the international standards tests Called SGML and it was really popular. In fact, it was so popular that at CERN where Tim worked There were volumes of it. There were lots and lots of SGML and so Tim said Let's look across the SGML and see what occurs a lot and we'll see that they're all mean the same thing and we'll Extract from that just like a dictionary editor does and so the original 20 tags in HTML minus the link that's where they came from basically And actually because we experiment in the browser This is how we got to all the other standards, too We went from on every single one of the occasions of things that are standardized We went from something that was deployed in a browser that was proprietary a proposal and Literally the next day without a byte of code changing that was standard So We think you know we can do better than this and a Bunch of people got together in standards and came up with this Document the extensible web manifesto. Can I ask just real quick like can you raise your hand if you've heard of this document? Okay, that's depressing to me So the extensive web manifesto is a really short document But it is sort of like a declaration of independence level thing more than a constitution level thing and what it does is it lays out a vision that is in line with all these things that we talked about and It says that we really need to reimagine our approach to web standards and we need to involve developers and tighten the feedback loop because You can't wait for 15 years to get your hands on something like you have to ship code right like What's the reason you want to learn a web standard so we feel smart? No, it's because you have a job to get done right like That's broken. We can't do that. We have to tighten that we have to compress that somehow We need to get ideas out there sooner be able to evaluate them sooner and be able to take feedbacks in there So we ask that you prioritize that standards bodies prioritize their work on primitives Low-level things we want them to give us socket. They you know an electrical socket and we'll do lots from there, right? We'll imagine the higher levels and not just give us new ones But look in the platform because there's lots in there already that isn't exposed There's lots of magic in the platform CSS is entirely magic. How does it work? We don't know There's this thing in CSS that does layout and it's called the box tree right like the box tree is the thing Do you know that in an explorer all the way up until 11? No box tree Because like it could only be observed like spooky action at a distance like You could still pass all the tests without actually having a box tree So that's messed up. Let's not do that And we want to like rather than ship things with browsers where possible We want to give people something that works in all browsers So, you know not just here's a bunch of text that you might misunderstand. You probably won't read It's not really of any value like here's the thing What can you do with it? Does it work? Does it suck? We didn't know and that we need to incubate these ideas like we need to find a better way to do that and That standards or work better at like dictionaries than they do like startups So this idea is totally winning and that's totally exciting This is the guiding principle today at ECMA W3C and what way? And they're changing policies to accommodate this one is that there is an incubator community group That is totally public where new ideas are proposed whether they're from me or Matt or Justin or The crown team Ideas go there and we can look at what ideas are pitched and we can try and use them where possible and We can weigh them in the balance. This is one of my paintings Okay, but there's still a problem because the way that standards work is through communication and communication is really really hard The way that it works historically is that we'll get on a plane and go fly somewhere and talk to people a few times a year Or we'll all join a mailing list So I want to tell you meetup Has four million people who call themselves web developers That's not all of the web developers That's just the ones who are motivated enough and know enough about meetup and are motivated enough to come out and come to at least One time right they sign it up from eat up joining mailing lists is a much lower bar than that So you can imagine that we would have more than four million people on the mailing list shouting at one another and I Imagine we would get nowhere quickly So it's the alternative idea four million of us get a plane and go where right What venue could accommodate four million people and how could you possibly organize it to? Achieve anything usual you couldn't so that's where you guys come in not you guys yins So the idea is chapters and chapters is a way to decentralize this So rather than just say hey, you know whenever you want you go look at this community thing and you know Then what you send feedback on a forum? I don't know like it's still not great So chapters away we can get together right we can people in local places can come and And here's why this idea is going to win because like the history of the galaxy we have don't panic and we're slightly cheaper So By this I mean asking questions in a forum for standards today. It's like kind of scary right like It's easy to feel like you're going to be judged you feel like those people must be on a completely different plane than you You don't want to feel like there's a possibility you might get ridiculed by the people who created the language or something right? But in this room like we can talk right Like I don't know all your names, but I'd like to We could Ask any questions in a group like this is actually really easy. This is a lot like the build night that they do we want to get together and we want to Fix the economics in a way that's like these are the proposals What are you interested in and we can look at them we can talk to them you can try you can try them out You can take them to work and maybe get real work done which wouldn't that be phenomenal right like you could take something and use it For selfish purposes to try and get something done and then if that turns out to not be so good Or if it turns out to be fantastic for you think you know how to make it better you can So that's the idea There's like a few examples of things that are in the incubator community group right now And I feel like I'm running long so I had some kind of more in-depth examples to show you but These are all things that are very hard to do today to get right That you might not even think about But they're very very very hard like paradoxically hard problems from an accessibility standpoint and these are three proposals that make those things easy So I'm totally happy to show anybody those afterward or any other one but that's the idea chapters and so what I want you to do is Don't be silent have your voice be heard come to chapters join the rebellion Help us extend the went forward questions comments anybody want to Yes, we're going to be announcing why you watch it is Code and supply will be organizing it with bearded studios and the jQuery foundation And so the idea is that we can have lots of deep discussion and we can ask silly questions or you know, whatever and then That will be summarized, you know as we learn a little bit We'll write a kind of summary and we'll shove that back out into web standards in a manageable way So we'll make it possible to hear for a million voices So one of the things that I feel is an obstacle I just want to go on bill a website is What framework what infrastructure do you use and how do you pick one and it seems like that's changed dramatically over the last In the years a lot of it is like what it used to be back in the day It was taking HTML into strings and trying to you can't get everything together to make a screen that looked like something Still a lot of things are that yeah, so if you use something that happens on the server side It is effectively crunching together strings because HTML is a serialization, right? It's just text Which is one of things that makes it powerful But then it gets parsed out and created into the document object model and the document object model has like events and it can be scripted and So there's kind of more modern things that run in the browser that are single-page sort of applications, right that You send across a serialization and what to do with it and that all happens in the browser without Reloading a whole page. So both exist at the same time and now there are things like ember for example has I think it's called fast boot where they can run on both sides They can take it and send you the initial thing as HTML or They can operate through the DOM and do scripting in a single page the really cool thing about the other sort of single-page thing is there's a whole bunch of new technologies that Like Open their their socket level thing right they open up new doors for how we think about that and their web Oriented so those things those states have URLs you can send somebody a link to the exact thing that you're looking at just like you always could with With it's just you know a string-based thing that you send back, but there's no right answer There's any number of easy things depending on what you prefer So what you're comfortable with you can find any number of like good answers and I'm sure that other people would Totally help you with that like any other Amy Happens with status bodies Sort of seeing is that a lot of times really two reasons for a standard organization to exist I'm just like a common good kind of thing or it's about like a Defensive play for an organization or companies. It's good point So this seems to be like Yeah Yeah, how do you anticipate Yeah, so Let me see if I can summarize that for the microphone Effectively the question and correct me if I misstated the question is that Like the reasons for participating in standards are complex, right? Some aspects of it are sort of for the greater good and others are like Defensive sorts of things so that other people can't run away with patent or come back and see you or whatever That is actually one of the believe it or not one of the most important things in standards and The question was this chapters seems like it's really more communally oriented and how do we prevent how do we Entice I suppose that other people to participate and not block us is that the idea How do you anticipate handling Companies that like own a web browser. That's the question, right? Okay, so all these companies are members of the W3C most of them are members of the W what WG and all of them are members of ECMA and It's done It's already done. So that's why I was saying like this is Herculean level stuff when you go to the When you go to Well, let's just go there. I think we can actually go there Is not the great browser When we go to what way this is actually part of W3C it's a community group and When you go to participate on here you effectively Have a like license, you know that you're going to participate in the standard So does that answer a question like they are participating It is part of the way standards work now I Don't foresee anybody Blocking that it was one of the big concerns with this and we appear to be past it the lawyers are all seem more or less pretty happy and Did I answer your question because you don't look convinced I You want to ship it you want to ship it? Yeah Yeah, so Clearly there will be a need for new sockets, right? There are new things that we can't possibly Fake right if you wanted to do like for example push notifications Where you know you get a notification that pops up in the upper right hand of your screen or on your phone That says hey this person send you this thing and here's a link. You can go check it out There's no way to fake that right like that's a low-level capability. So we do need browsers to do that kind of thing and They know that game and they know that works together that they have to work together The thing that we did that improves that is that not them will ship those things on prefixed Into the wild until we're further along in the process so the norm now for new things is to ship them behind a flag so if you Go into your Chrome or your Firefox and go to the settings There's flags that you can set that says I want to enable this experiment and You can do it and you can try that of course The utility of that is somewhat limited because you can't ship a product like that or you would be ill advised to ship a product like that It's very clear to you then that it's an experiment There is still the potential that somebody can block something a low-level thing That happened with web components, you know what components but composing a change in the universe guys There's twice I said guys I'm trying to work on that There's this thing called the Shadow DOM. Do you know what the show that is? Okay so If you were to look at the video player for example the video there's a new element called not new but it's the element called video and You know how that thing is implemented in the browser is it basically already is HTML CSS in JavaScript But there's this kind of protective bubble around it and what they did is exposed that and called the Shadow DOM Not everybody had exactly the same thing and how we exposed that is was like questionable. We didn't really know how and Some browsers like Mozilla and Chrome Really really really want to ship this thing right like we really really want to get this thing out the door and Apple said We're not ready to commit to that It turned out to be a good thing because what Apple came up with is actually much better than What we had on the table at the time the compromises they made and everything that was actually better and part of the way that it Got better is because we did have people like trying to fake it and doing experiments behind flags and everything We discovered that We can do better than that so You know there's still challenges if you but if there are people there are challenges, right? That's the way It's humanity But I think that this is much much much better. I think it's really exciting stuff Okay Okay So the question from the internet was How will standards bodies? Treat feedback from From chapters will we be taken seriously So one of the aims of chapters is to pair Chapters with people who have some connection back to standards. So for example here We started this up and I'm here and I represent jQuery to standards bodies in the in W3C So I can take that feedback and I can take it back to jQuery and jQuery becomes our Bargainer right but jQuery is the jQuery foundation is organizing this but like we have people from other companies for example in Portland Somebody from Google wants to set up a thing in Portland. So I Think it will be taken seriously in fact This WICG dial This has only been up for maybe a year and a half and I don't think a lot of people know about it yet really but There are ideas that have come from the community that have already Like entered standards So, yeah, I think I think that they'll take us seriously and the other piece of that is that These standards bodies already know that they have this gap because we've been you know selling them this thing with the extensible web manifesto and for a long time So they recognize that this is a big gap. In fact, they're doing a lot more outreach now The W3C has this thing called the technical architecture group and they're kind of steering committee for where the work goes and They're chaired by Tim Berners-Lee the creator of the web And they now actually every time they have a face-to-face meeting they have it in different places all the time They actually have a meetup just like this where you can come and ask your questions and say hey Freakin deal with this thing, right? and You know they know that they have a gap and they're doing things to to help close it the first one is from the time that Mozilla team Right, so the question is from the time that Safari and Mozilla should video How long did it take for other people? So, what is the right case? That was weapon home Jeff So the question is what is the right pace effectively and How like how long was the gap once we decided that we needed a video element and we had a Implementation of it like how long is the appropriate time, right, okay? So well with a prolly fill one answer is who cares? If you could make video as an element work everywhere First of all, there's New opportunities there like we can create new ways to cash So that really you only have to download that ever from one site And then you have support for that tag and there are efforts around that they're like so that's kind of cool but so if you could download the proposal and Everybody gets the proposal you don't have to wait for them to implement As far as like when it becomes native because it is nice that we eventually get things that are native How long should it take the answer is? But I'll tell you something that's almost even worse because everybody ships video now, right? I mean, that's great except that Like Firefox you couldn't use a lot of stuff because they support different codecs That sucked Much more than that chrome is the only one there's somebody just recently Made a post about this where it's a like they are fixing this in one browser. I don't know which but At least up until say a month ago The only video player that was accessible Was chrome So y'all were using some old flash thing and if you had one that was accessible In some ways that was better than the one we're using now not in all ways I mean I actually much prefer that we have but you know you want to have an accessible video player You want somebody to be able to use it like I talked about this last time in the last meetup I asked a question Offered some feedback, but there are times when everybody is disabled, right? If you break your arm or if you sprain your arm your you have a like It's difficult for you to operate a mouse, right and you can use your keyboard and tab through things You can use enter and type and There are other things that you can do To use something and if you can't use them Because they're not accessible that impacts you right so Like I think it's like 15% of people in the world have some kind of disability That's a lot of people to cut out, you know, you ultimately you want things that are accessible and Not having an accessible video player as our native video players in my mind kind of bad. I Kind of would have rather had a universal polyfill until we decided that in order to ship It needs to be accessible and everybody ships at their own pace, but Yeah, all the Well, it's not an incremental Yeah, I don't know that's another standards organization. I mean this is like I showed like this is actually the Express fundamental principles of Ackman What way and W3C like the people involved in that like it has a lot of support in those It's it's winning as an idea So it's reforming those things as much as it is creating something else The only thing that's creating additionally is new outlets within that so This WICG.io is actually a W3C effort Right, but this is you know, it's trying to shift the way things work to try To involve, you know a new approach Does that make sense? Yeah, so here the only thing that's really a proposal at this point is chapters So what we want to do is distribute it want to get people from around You know around the world to start up there are plenty of meetups There are lots of meetups where people go and do things like build nights and they talk about, you know How how do you do this and teach me this and you want things that are relevant to your life? And the point is that there are lots of proposals that are actually quite relevant to your life, right? That you would to be totally interested in learning about and maybe using so You know, why not involve that into our meetup process so that we use that as a means of both Education and communication both ways That that's that answer Yeah Okay, so they're oriented there or yeah really So like there's a lot that isn't defined yet like for example I don't know if maybe there's opportunity for us to do like some Like special build nights to cooperate build nights where that's what we're gonna focus on, you know, I mean So that makes sense or yeah, okay Yes, so If you have thoughts or ideas Let's talk Matt you look like you want to ask a question Make a statement Fundamental primitives By opening up these APIs So like wetting points allow you to build your Enough people do have a certain way through polygons and polygons that syntax can be grabbed on to my stanchion And that's really the threshold They use our To create things that are Instead of saying here's what you want Yes, that's exactly And I think that concept like a very good example of that concept actually really like How do you follow the responses The picture element, do you know about the picture element? So so well to set it up there's new challenges that come out the web was totally unprepared for like all these different size screens and Retina displays these high-def displays and everything and The image tag was actually kind of forced in by Mark Andreessen He just slid it in as an experiment and said that's what we're gonna do and then everybody had to copy it Oh sorry That's something else So How would you do things like deal with the fact that some people might have a slower connection? For example, they might have like different resolution They there's all different kinds of things that might impact what actual image you want on there the way I've had no way to accommodate that and What developers began a community group community groups are things you can create in the W3C You have to get reach a critical mass of it's small It's like five people and one of them has to be a sponsor from W3C but you can create a community group and then you can use W3C resources to organize and talk about things and The goal of most of them is to go somewhere, right? So the responsive image community group Tried to do this and they worked with standards and they worked with the what wig Who kind of told me both like hey? They work with 33 C who was like they don't really know like there's a Really long story there that could be it is talks of its own But they actually created The picture on it and they created the picture fill and the picture fill was used on like actual percentages of The top million sites. So is it a good idea? I think you can safely say it was a good idea And so now that's going to be part of the standard. I think Somebody might know Who supports it with the word that I might use if you want, but I'm pretty sure it's actually natively supported in at least two browsers right now But that has a very yeah that path was very very bumpy and so a lot of those people in fact the WICG is Actually headed up by mostly people from the response from his community group the Responsibility is community group and the extensive web community group had a really a lot of overlap and worked on really a lot of things a Lot of people kind of crossing both those Do you know smashing magazine I don't know it has like 24 million readers or something crazy like that, but do you know it there? I Houdini is maybe the most exciting development in CSS that you've never heard of Houdini as a task force that his whole entire job is to explain what's underneath CSS and Expose the same parts to developers We know that there's a CSS parser right so you use sass or you use less or use post CSS Or you use my thing like We all have to parse CSS and actually it's really really hard and All of those other parsers actually fail Like just around the edges like sass is really really good, but I think it's not a hundred percent either Wouldn't it be great if there was like a parser we can expose because the browser has one Right like why should we write that again like the part the browser already knows how to parse CSS, right? And the reason is because it's just hidden down there The browser already has this thing called paint like it just how you blip this stuff on the screen And that ties into the rendering process when it be great if we could say like here's how you have a custom painter You just plug in your own custom painter and you can Imagine new possibilities with CSS. I don't know if you've ever seen gss But gss is really interesting It's kind of What CSS might have been if we come up with it today. It's constraint-based styles But It exists, but like you have to kind of reinvent the universe before you can even do any of it and so The Houdini task forces exposing all those low-level things you can look this up If I'll maybe I'll share a link to it, but there's if you prefer presentations There's three or four presentations on this now This is the direction that Matt is talking about we don't want To spend a lot of time on these fairly high-level things like AppCache that Contained lots of new magic, right? We want to expose the magic we already have and worry about where there's new magic necessary because there will be like push notifications We want to just keep that small so that we can find out when developers start plugging into it Why do they build you know do they build? toasters and refrigerators or do they build something else Yeah Guys Like the source source it yeah, so they're like hey We want to do this way is called Was it Apple that did that or was it? Yeah, I could be wrong too. I wish we had somebody from the RECG here Yeah, I thought it was actually Hixie what's that what it was so if you don't know Yeah Good Yeah, yeah a lot of people who are involved with that Wrote articles and gave talks later about what a horror that was those articles and things actually were part of the thing that helped us finally get to where we have the WICG I Just wanted to mention this because it's relevant to your thing So recall that their W3C was this group of people that they had to work by consensus and the what way Do like dropped off and began their own thing and I told you that all of these things they all work differently They all have subtle differences in how they try to attack the problem, right? So what WICG has let's call it a benevolent dictator model Where yes, there's all this discussion, but ultimately it's like pretty much one guy who decides And his name is Ian Hickson or was not not so much anymore But um and so when you have a problem you would take it and there would be lots of discussion, but sometimes Hixie is what he's called sometimes Hixie would just like Write stuff down and be like there it is it's standard right and it sort of didn't matter what everybody else said so There's challenges with like all these models. So like you know you were asking earlier like how do you plan to solve all the problems? Well, I don't know if I'll solve all the problems, but I feel like we'll do much better because the economics are right We don't have these glacial time scales We already have won the important battles like all of the The browsers and the standards bodies are very supportive of this and Yeah, go there's something that Brian will probably ever tell you Because like he's himself but A lot of my friends He started talking and Brian was able to connect me with some of the best interviews Chris Wilson who worked on the windows version of those a He worked on internet for all the way through whatever six or something Began CSS faculty And You've got me touched with Alex Russell So Brian is connected to all of these people And they all respect him incredibly And he's a nice guy Yeah Thanks That was beautiful It's amazing that he's here in Pittsburgh and he's willing to help. I mean it's super cool. I think it's like very different Yeah, I'm from the mountains. I very much agree and I think that we're super excited I want to have a formal end, but I'm not kicking anyone out just to like have that break Because it sounded like there was a that was just like perfect thing to break in on But What's next? Look where we're gonna go Brian, we're gonna we're gonna announce We have to work on when but it will be on code and supply will help organize it and We're gonna start meet up. Maybe I don't know maybe the first one might be good to do as a boat night thing You can maybe circle some more people, but Join the revolutions. Oh, yeah, so there is actually a slack channel and we'll get you connected with that through So pay attention to chapters IO Fits by it's where we'll be putting out information there and we'll put information on our mailing list to Yeah, we'll put people over to the after stuff and this thing relies on at least like Four or five of you being super involved in like like really yeah, we need like we really need so Revolution needs you So Pittsburgh Pittsburgh will be the first Yeah, let's call it official one so there was a pilot in Vermont Which was you know small rural thing I did that and then Some things happen in my personal life that forced me to move back to Pittsburgh Well, you understand I'm saying like it My life will change. Oh, yeah, okay that encouraged me warmly All good things that lured me lured me to Pittsburgh Yeah, I was in Vermont and I and I came to Pittsburgh and we kind of shut that one down That was just a pilot. We called it a pilot we could figure out kind of how it worked and if it would work and Some other people around the world were Interested in maybe starting one up, but they needed connection to get it going And so the jQuery foundation is now behind that and we are connecting people as They want to be connected to start them up. So yes Pittsburgh is I Think You Sorry, that was more like a prompt for you to say than a question Yeah Yeah, I just realized that the mic is probably still on That guy shot talk And I'll end this so that you can't defend this