 Hello, it's a pleasure to be here with you this morning to kick off day two of the Polymer Summit He's been Galbraith and he's Dion Elmer So to start out with I do have a bit of bad news We have actually been practicing our dance number for quite a long time now Yeah, and we were just informed that we didn't get the rights for the music. Oh man It's a it's a shame because we had tailored this number to this one particular song and without it We're just gonna have to move on to our backup talk, which we'd prepared just in case There's one little bit of good news though, which is Rob Dodson snuck in and did a little video of us practicing So maybe we'll get something for next year. Yeah, maybe maybe So we've both been working on the web for a really long time Initially as developers building things on top of the platform back in the mid 90s And we've worked in various capacities at places like Google palm like Matt was just talking about and Mozilla pushing the web platform forward And now we're at Google. This is Dion's second time my first where Dion leads developer relations and Ben's product lead on Chrome And in our new roles we're in positions again to help steer the web And so we've been thinking a lot about its future and this morning We want to share some of our thoughts with you Just to sort of get a conversation started both here and afterwards and hear your feedback about where the web platform should go And as we've got to riff on this again and really kind of go deep We can't wait to share just how excited we are about the future of the web Which may not be obvious to some of you because the web's actually been through some tough years lately Which is kind of a shame because the web in its early years was such an amazing Wonderkin sort of personified by Mark and Driesen on the slide It's amazing when you sort of sit back and ponder all that the web was able to accomplish in such a short time And I think one of the first accomplishments that comes to mind is the global disruption of Basically every industry that the web kicked off that's transformed the world we live in and that disruption is still reverberating today And Before the web do you remember this you remember using things like gopher fdp IRC You know I was at the University of Minnesota. Yeah, there we go I Was at the University of Minnesota where we gave birth to gopher and it was really you know useful in the computer lab But not so much for kind of the average Joe And so really the web to me kind of packaged up the internet and made it the first consumer friendly and really Develop a friendly platform I gotta say I'm a little upset about all the applause because I'm gonna have to listen to stories about gopher now for the next two weeks It was amazing You know the eye the iPhone we sort of forget about that eye and iPhone sometimes and that goes back to the iMac where it explicitly stood for the internet Mac because back when Steve Jobs came to Apple a second time and Sort of figured out how to bring the Mac to market. He felt like he needed to do something different to compete with the Windows app ecosystem. He had to change the game And so he marketed the iMac as the best way to get to the internet and position the internet It's really the thing that mattered not apps and He kind of had a point back then because the internet was where all the cool new content was that people wanted to engage with And so the internet in addition to its other accomplishments It also opened up the marketplace again for a platform like the Mac to come in and it wasn't just the Mac Can you imagine using Linux without being able to use a browser? So at this point in time the web was a truly unprecedented success But Then what happened the web had a little younger brother come along we'll call him mobile and You know when your first younger sibling comes along you got this cute little baby doesn't love a little baby It doesn't look how cute it is and even had cute little toys that it could play with these are so fun You could do some fun cute little things with them and like a lot of younger brothers You try and kind of emulate an act like the older brother So he tried to do cute little web like things you know back then in mobile and then before you knew it that little That little brother mobile grew up and turned it to something that was maybe Some some that someone might think is a little bit stronger a little bit more capable a little bit more talented than his older sibling and people suddenly noticed and Before you knew it Mobile apps became the new thing and at this point we started to question were the web's best days actually behind us And you know the web's been through lots of difficult moments before if you remember things like Java applets flash and silver light all tried to go over the top of the web and Replace the web with a different UI layer and the web's constantly been able to reinvent itself in pivotal moments like Firefox coming to market and restoring browser diversity at a time when people openly questioned whether there was even a need for browser innovation Or Ajax spurring a reinvention of web apps resetting what was even possible to build on the web or Chrome bringing speed stability and security to a whole new level and Enabling the landscape we have of really sophisticated high-performance web applications today So the web has this history of reinventing itself to adapt to the changing landscape and new opportunities And then mobile certainly became another one of these opportunities right at this point in time the web is the vendor kind Became maybe a little bit bloated Maybe a little bit out of shape compared to mobile apps And it was time to kind of get back to the gym to get fit again And we did that and that resulted in things like amp PWA all of these capabilities We've been talking about the last few years making the web truly awesome on mobile And that continues as we come with new technologies like WebGL web assembly who D&E etc etc The web's working out hard to enable these new class of applications And so now the web's kind of catching up to that younger brother, but What about the future as we look forward to what's on the horizon? We actually think the future of the web is set up to be really exciting and To explain that we want to talk about three trends that are just around the corner and how the web is Situated to meet these opportunities First the proliferation of even more devices and we want to talk about augmented reality for a minute And finally we want to talk about assistive interfaces To start out with let's consider today's Smartphone desktop world. There are so many devices it's really hard as a native developer to keep up with compatibility across all these different devices in all the worldwide markets and it that explains why things like watches and and smartphones Sorry watches and tablets aren't universally supported because of the effort required to extend to these and Then consider smart TVs which are pretty ubiquitous and other smart devices that are now hitting the market and new ones That are just around the corner How are we going to manage developing for all these different devices? And it sort of helps you realize that native is really fun when you're targeting a relatively homogenous device surface But it can be a nightmare when you're tackling all of this complexity And so it really makes you appreciate that native makes the most sense when you're creating an experience That's tailored to a particular device or device sort of profile And that's really why you sort of use the word native because it sort of indicates that you're targeting something That's really specific and then also have explained why one of the world's most popular Vertically integrated hardware software companies has their own native SDK split into different flavors for watches and TVs and tablet smartphones and laptops It's sort of like us come into Copenhagen for the best experience We'd love to like fully understand and learn Danish But a that's kind of hard be we're only here for a week And that doesn't really scale like we're into Poland in a couple of weeks to speak at a Google developer day Fortunately for us. There's a cross-platform language called English. That's kind of a fantastic alternative Thanks very much by the way And so the web's always been about this trade-off of Sacrificing sort of tight native coupling for the ability to adapt to a wide variety of devices and platforms And the idea of the web adapting itself to these wildly different device types has been back to the web in the very beginning Even the original version of CSS Contemplated the feature to enable a web page to adapt to text-to-speech devices for example And these mechanisms of the web were largely ahead of their time You could use them for theming and you can see this in sites like CSS Zen garden But now in the multi-device world we're entering we're finding new use for these mechanisms and things like media queries Bring them to a new level of maturity and usefulness So as we enter into this multi-device world We think the web is actually ideally situated to help us cope with its challenges And it's ready for this fundamental trade-off that will be required to scale to this world We're entering of new platforms form factors and modalities Let's talk about augmented reality for a second. You know with AR We're seeing a lot of these different scenarios pop out that are pretty compelling You know we're merging digital and physical objects for shopping gaming and much much more and Seeing it through a phone is neat. It's already useful It's nice to be able to kind of go zoom in and play around with things But what's going to happen when this explodes in the future and we get fulfilled a vision through glasses or whatever Technology is actually going to bring this to you. We think this is actually going to be pretty fantastic And when you think to this future You look at the heart of AR to us it looks kind of like a browser It's about mapping physical addresses to virtual content and this is what the web does every day through URLs And what do you want to hear you want to link to third-party content to seamlessly browse around and explore Different things that are out there in the world. You don't want to install apps for every experience as you go around So to us when we look at AR it seems like a natural extension to the model of the web itself Last thing we want to talk about our assistive interfaces because now that computers can Understand you when you speak to them and they can speak to you. It's a fantastic way to get things done I mean really why use the linked list of native app launchers and bespoke app interfaces when you can use the voice Hashtaple to get right to the functionality bucket that you're looking for I was pretty fantastic if you can say set a timer for 30 minutes instead of having to open up the app and navigate through It it's really effective But not always Does anyone remember calling into phone hotlines something like a movie phone listing where you're sitting there on the phone While this voice comes back with like there are 10 movies close to you Was that a thing here there's like a hand in the back there's one hand Painful voice trees everyone's gone through that a little bit. It was a very frustrating experience And it really shows that assistive ui's to be effective They have to span all of the screens in our life Because you want to be able to start a session and have that session seamlessly go to whatever screen is around you in the movie Phone example you want to be able to use your voice to say what movies are playing then you want to see the listings on it on a Tablet or a TV that's close by and communicate which one you want to see So this means that the assistive Ecosystem that we're running into Also is coupled to the device problem. We mentioned earlier, but it introduces another problem Because now the assistant has to act as an agent for the user and in order to do that It has to understand the content of the experience where have we heard the term user agent before So in order for this to work We have to introduce a semantic layer into our content Which again takes us back to the future of the web as a recent article by Zach Blum on the history of CSS sort of reminded us it included this awesome quote from Mark Andreessen where he talks about having to explain to developers that it's a feature of The web that you don't actually get to control the presentation of your content that the web is just about content That it that actually eventually failed as browsers bowed to pressure to hack in presentation tags into html And the web tried again with CSS the original vision of CSS was to enforce this separation And also there was a failed pivot to XML and XSL. Do you guys remember that anyone? Again, no, no, we got a few more than movie phone actually So we've tried and I think these attempts really ultimately failed because they were just too far ahead of their time Ultimately, everyone was just trying to display pixels on the screen and the sort of multi-device Multimodality future was science fiction and that there's one thing we're really good at as developers It's finding the easiest path to solutions But with the need for intelligent agents to broker these experiences and for those agents to understand what's happening We think it's time for us as a community to revisit these ideas and evolve them for the future that we're running into And now we have web components where we get to separate semantic markup from the actual implementation We've barely scratched the surface on how we can separate those things at the moment And so in review when we look at these trends when we look at the devices that are coming an augmented reality and Intelligent agents we think they actually play to the web's strengths And it's one of the reasons why we're so bullish and excited about the future of the web And it also paints for us a potential roadmap of where the web needs to go from here So coming back to the brothers again, you know, they each had their kind of time in the Sun at this point They've kind of matured. We've got mature platforms on both native and on the web And we believe both actually have a long future ahead of them We've got interesting things to come unless of course another little brother or sister comes along and gets to usurp them Thank you. Thank you very much