Journal tags: amsterdam

My stint as one of the hosts of CSS Day went very well indeed. I enjoyed myself and people seemed to like the cut of my jib.

During the event there was a real buzz on Mastodon, which was heartening to see. I was beginning to worry that hashtagging events was going to be collatoral damage from Elongate, but there was plenty of conference-induced FOMO to be experienced on the fediverse.

The event itself was, as always, excellent. Both in terms of content and organisation.

Some themes emerged during CSS Day, which I always love to see. These emergent properties are partly down to curation and partly down to serendipity.

The last few years of CSS Day have felt like getting a firehose of astonishing new features being added to the language. There was still plenty of cutting-edge stuff this year—masonry! anchor positioning!—but there was also a feeling of consolidation, asking how to get all this amazing new stuff into our workflows.

Matthias’s opening talk on day one and Stephen’s closing talk on the same day complemented one another perfectly. Both managed to inspire while looking into the nitty-gritty practicalities of the web design process.

It was, astoundingly, Matthias’s first ever conference talk. I have no doubt it won’t be the last—it was great!

I gave Stephen a good-natured roast in my introduction, partly because it was his birthday, partly because we’re old friends, but mostly because it was enjoyable for me to watch him squirm. Of course his talk was, as always, superb. Don’t tell him, but he might be one of my favourite speakers.

The topic of graphic design tools came up more than once. It’s interesting to see how the issues with them have changed. It used to be that design tools—Photoshop, Sketch, Figma—were frustrating because they were writing cheques that CSS couldn’t cash. Now the frustration is the exact opposite. Our graphic design tools aren’t capable of the kind of fluid declarative design we can now accomplish in web browsers.

But the biggest rift remains not with tools or technologies, but with people and mindsets. Our tools can reinforce mindsets but the real divide happens in how different people approach CSS.

Both Josh and Kevin get to the heart of this in their tremendous tutorials, and that was reflected in their talks. They showed the difference between having the bare minimum understanding of CSS in order to get something done as quickly as possible, and truly understanding how CSS works in order to open up a world of possibilities.

For people in the first category, Sarah Dayan was there to sing the praises of utility-first CSS AKA atomic CSS. I commend her bravery!

During the Q&A, I restrained myself from being too Paxmanish. But I did have l’esprit d’escalier afterwards when I realised that the entire talk—and all the answers afterwards—depended on two mutually-incompatiable claims:

1. The great thing about atomic CSS is that it’s a constrained vocabulary so your team has to conform, and
2. The other great thing about it is that it’s utility-first, not utility-only so you can break out of it and use regular CSS if you want.

Insert .gif of character from The Office looking to camera.

Most of the questions coming in during the Q&A reflected my own take: how about we use utility classes for some things, but not all things. Seems sensible.

Anyway, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about the substance of what Sarah was saying, there was no denying that it was a great presentation. They were all great presentations. That’s unusual, and I say that as a conference organiser as well as an attendee. Everyone brings their A-game to CSS Day.

Mind you, it is exhausting. I say it every year, but it always feels like one talk too many. Not that any individual talk wasn’t good, but the sheer onslaught of deep dives into the innards of CSS has my brain exploding before the day is done.

A highlight for me was getting to introduce Fantasai’s talk on the design principles of CSS, which was right up my alley. I don’t think most people realise just how much we owe her for her years of work on standards. The web would be in a worse place without the Herculean work she’s done behind the scenes.

Another highlight was getting to see some of the students I met back in March. They were showing some of their excellent work during the breaks. I find what they’re doing just as inspiring as the speakers on stage.

In fact, when I was filling in the post-conference feedback form, there was a question: “Who would you like to see speak at CSS Day next year?” I was racking my brains because everyone I could immediately think of has already spoken at some point. So I wrote, “It would be great to see some of those students speaking about their work.”

I think it would be genuinely fascinating to get their perspective on what we consider modern CSS, which to them is just CSS.

Either way I’ll back next year for sure.

It’s funny, but usually when a conference is described as “inspiring” it’s because it’s tackling big galaxy-brain questions. But CSS Day is as nitty-gritty as it gets and I found it truly inspiring. Like, I couldn’t wait to open up my laptop and start writing some CSS. That kind of inspiring.

I was in Amsterdam last week. Usually I’m in that city for an event like the excellent CSS Day. Not this time. I was there as a guest of Vasilis. He invited me over to bother his students at the CMD (Communications and Multimedia Design) school.

There’s a specific module his students are partaking in that’s right up my alley. They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web.

Yes, all the excitement of taxes combined with the thrilling world of web forms.

Seriously though, I genuinely get excited by the potential for progressive enhancement here. Sure, there’s the obvious approach of building in layers; HTML first, then CSS, then a sprinkling of JavaScript. But there’s also so much potential for enhancement within each layer.

Got your form fields marked up with the right input types? Great! Now what about autocomplete, inputmode, or pattern attributes?

Got your styles all looking good on the screen? Great! Now what about print styles?

Got form validation working? Great! Now how might you use local storage to save data locally?

As well as taking this practical module, most of the students were also taking a different module looking at creative uses of CSS, like making digital fireworks, or creating works of art with a single div. It was fascinating to see how the different students responded to the different tasks. Some people loved the creative coding and dreaded the progressive enhancement. For others it was exactly the opposite.

Having to switch gears between modules reminded me of switching between prototypes and production:

Alternating between production projects and prototyping projects can be quite fun, if a little disorienting. It’s almost like I have to flip a switch in my brain to change tracks.

Here’s something I noticed: the students love using :has() in CSS. That’s so great to see! Whereas I might think about how to do something for a few minutes before I think of reaching for :has(), they’ve got front of mind. I’m jealous!

In general, their challenges weren’t with the vocabulary or syntax of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The more universal problem was project management. Where to start? What order to do things in? How long to spend on different tasks?

If you can get good at dealing with those questions and not getting overwhelmed, then the specifics of the actual coding will be easier to handle.

This was particularly apparent when it came to JavaScript, the layer of the web stack that was scariest for many of the students.

I encouraged them to break their JavaScript enhancements into two tasks: what you want to do, and how you then execute that.

Start by writing out the logic of your script not in JavaScript, but in whatever language you’re most comfortable with: English, Dutch, whatever. In the course of writing this down, you’ll discover and solve some logical issues. You can also run your plain-language plan past a peer to sense-check it.

It’s only then that you move on to translating your logic into JavaScript. Under each line of English or Dutch, write the corresponding JavaScript. You might as well put // in front of the plain-language sentence while you’re at it to make it a comment—now you’ve got documentation baked in.

You’ll still run into problems at this point, but they’ll be the manageable problems of syntax and typos.

So in the end, it wasn’t my knowledge of specific HTML, CSS, or JavaScript APIs that proved most useful to pass on to the students. It was advice like that around how to approach HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

I also learned a lot during my time at the school. I had some very inspiring conversations with the web developers of tomorrow. And I was really impressed by how much the students got done just in the three days I was hanging around.

I’d love to do it again sometime.

Every week of June sees me at a web event, but in a different capacity each time.

At the end of the first full week in June, I went to CSS Day in Amsterdam as an attendee. It was thought-provoking, as always. And it was great to catch up with my front-of-the-front-end friends.

Last week I went to Pixel Pioneers in Bristol as a speaker. Fortunately I was on first so I was able to get the speaking done with and enjoy the rest of the talks. It was a lovely little event and there was yet more catching up with old friends and making new ones.

This week is the big one. UX London is happening this week. This time I’m not there as an attendee or a speaker. I’m there as the curator and host.

On the one hand, I’m a bag of nerves. I’ve been preparing for this all year and now it’s finally happening. I keep thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong.

On the other hand, I’m ridiculously excited. I know I should probably express some modesty, but looking at the line-up I’ve assembled, I feel an enormous sense of pride. I’m genuinely thrilled at the prospect of all those great talks and workshops.

Nervous and excited. Those are the two wolves inside me right now.

If you’re going to be at UX London, I hope that you’re equally excited (and not nervous). There are actually still some last-minute tickets available if you haven’t managed to get one yet.

See you there!

I was in Amsterdam two weeks ago for CSS Day. It was glorious!

I mean, even without the conference it was just so nice to travel somewhere—by direct train, no less!—and spend some time in a beautiful European city enjoying the good weather.

And of course the conference was great too. I’ve been to CSS Day many times. I love it although technically it should be CSS days now—the conference runs for two days.

It’s an event that really treats CSS for what it is—a powerful language worthy of respect. Also, it has bitterballen.

This time I wasn’t just there as an attendee. I also had the pleasure of opening up the show. I gave a talk called In And Out Of Style, a look at the history—and alternative histories—of CSS.

The video is already online! I’ll get the talk transcribed and publish the text here soon. Meanwhile here’s a list of links to relevant material.

I really, really enjoyed giving this talk. It was so nice to be speaking to a room—or in this case, a church—with real people. I’m done giving talks to my screen. It’s just not the same. Giving this talk made me realise how much I need that feedback from the crowd—the laughs, the nods, maybe even the occasional lightbulb appearing over someone’s head.

As usual, my talk was broad and philosophical in nature. Big-picture pretentious talks are kind of my thing. In this case, I knew that I could safely brush over the details of all the exciting new CSS stuff I mentioned because other talks would be diving deep. And boy, did they ever dive deep!

It’s a cliché to use the adjective “inspiring” to describe a conference, but given all that’s happening in the world of CSS right now, it was almost inevitable that CSS Day would be very inspiring indeed this year. Cascade layers, scoped styles, container queries, custom properties, colour spaces, animation and much much more.

If anything, it was almost too much. If I had one minor quibble with the event it would be that seven talks in a day felt like one talk too many to my poor brain (I think that Marc gets the format just right with Beyond Tellerrand—two days of six talks each). But what a great complaint to have—that there was a glut of great talks!

They’ve already announced the dates for next year’s CSS Day(s): June 8th and 9th, 2023. I strongly suspect that I’ll be there.

Thank you very much to ppk, Krijn, Martijn, and everyone involved in making this year’s CSS Day so good!

I’m very excited about speaking at CSS Day this year. My talk is called In And Out Of Style:

It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!

Technically, CSS Day won’t be the first outing for this talk but it will be the in-person debut. I had the chance to give the talk online last week at An Event Apart. Giving a talk online isn’t quite the same as speaking on stage, but I got enough feedback from the attendees that I’m feeling confident about giving the talk in Amsterdam. It went down well with the audience at An Event Apart.

If the description has you intrigued, come along to CSS Day to hear the talk in person. And if you like the subject matter, I’ve put together these links to go with the talk…

• A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon, Inventor of the Information Age by Jimmy Sonni and Rob Goodman
• The Web Is Agreement by Paul Downey
• CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild
• What is a good standard? An essay on W3C’s design principles by Bert Bos
• Design Principles
• Tweet by Miriam Suzanne
• Open UI

Blog posts

• The Languages Which Almost Became CSS by Zack Bloom
• A Look Back at the History of CSS by Jay Hoffmann

Presentations

• On the origin of cascades by Hidde de Vries
• CSS Reset by Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie

Proposals (email)

• Request for Comments: STYLESHEETS by Rob Raisch, June 1993
• Stylesheet Language by Pei Wei, October 1993
• Cascading HTML style sheets — a proposal by Håkon Wium Lie, October 1994

Papers (PDF)

• A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, 1948
• Cascading Style Sheets by Håkon Wium Lie, 2006

People (Wikipedia)

• Claude Shannon
• Grace Hopper
• Tim Berners-Lee

I see that Russell is planning to bring back Interesting this year. This makes me happy. Just seeing the return of in-person gatherings—run safely—is giving me life.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that lots of people are yearning for some in-person contact after two years of online events. The good news is that there are some excellent in-person web conferences on the horizon.

Beyond Tellerrand is back in Düsseldorf on May 2nd and 3rd. Marc ran some of the best online events during lockdown with his Stay Curious cafés, but there’s nothing beats the atmosphere of Beyond Tellerrand on its home turf.

If you can’t make it Düsseldorf—I probably can’t because I’m getting my passport renewed right now—there’s All Day Hey in Leeds on May 5th. Harry has put a terrific line-up together for this one-day, very affordable event.

June is shaping up to be a good month for events too. First of all, there’s CSS Day in Amsterdam on June 9th and 10th. I really, really like this event. I’m not just saying that because I’m speaking at this year’s CSS Day. I just love the way that the conference treats CSS with respect. If you self-identigy as a CSS person, then this is the opportunity to be with your people.

But again, if you can’t make it Amsterdam, never fear. The Pixel Pioneers conference returns to Bristol on June 10th. Another one-day event in the UK with a great line-up.

Finally, there’s the big one at the end of June. UX London runs from June 28th to June 30th:

Bringing the UX community back together

Yes, I’m biased because I’m curating the line-up but this is shaping up to be unmissable! It’s going to be so good to gather with our peers and get our brains filled by the finest of design minds.

At the start of this month I was in Amsterdam for a series of back-to-back events: Indie Web Camp Amsterdam, View Source, and Fronteers. That last one was where Remy and I debuted talk we’d been working on.

The Fronteers folk have been quick off the mark so the video is already available. I’ve also published the text of the talk here:

How We Built The World Wide Web In Five Days

This was a fun talk to put together. The first challenge was figuring out the right format for a two-person talk. It quickly became clear that Remy’s focus would be on the events of the five days we spent at CERN, whereas my focus would be on the history of computing, hypertext, and networks leading up to the creation of the web.

Now, we could’ve just done everything chronologically, but that would mean I’d do the first half of the talk and Remy would do the second half. That didn’t appeal. And it sounded kind of boring. So then we come up with the idea of interweaving the two timelines.

That worked remarkably well. The talk starts with me describing the creation of CERN in the 1950s. Then Remy talks about the first day of the hack week. I then talk about events in the 1960s. Remy talks about the second day at CERN. This continues until we join up about half way through the talk: I’ve arrived at the moment that Tim Berners-Lee first published the proposal for the World Wide Web, and Remy has arrived at the point of having running code.

At this point, the presentation switches gears and turns into a demo. I do not have the fortitude to do a live demo, so this was all down to Remy. He did it flawlessly. I have so much respect for people brave enough to do live demos, and do them well.

But the talk doesn’t finish there. There’s a coda about our return to CERN a month after the initial hack week. This was an opportunity for both of us to close out the talk with our hopes and dreams for the World Wide Web.

I know I’m biased, but I thought the structure of the presentation worked really well: two interweaving timelines culminating in a demo and finishing with the big picture.

There was a forcing function on preparing this presentation: Remy was moving house, and I was already going to be away speaking at some other events. That limited the amount of time we could be in the same place to practice the talk. In the end, I think that might have helped us make the most of that time.

We were both feeling the pressure to tell this story well—it means so much to us. Personally, I found that presenting with Remy made me up my game. Like I said:

It’s been a real treat working with Remy on this. Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s kind of a web hero of mine, so this was a real honour and a privilege for me.

This talk could have easily turned into a boring slideshow of “what we did on our holidays”, but I think we managed to successfully avoid that trap. We’re both proud of this talk and we’d love to give it again some time. If you’d like it at your event, get in touch.

In the meantime, you can read the text, watch the video, or look at the slides (but the slides really don’t make much sense in isolation).

It’s been a busy two weeks of travelling and speaking. Last week I spoke at Finch Conf in Edinburgh, Code Motion in Madrid, and Generate CSS in London. This week I was at Indie Web Camp, View Source, and Fronteers, all in Amsterdam.

The Edinburgh-Madrid-London whirlwind wasn’t ideal. I gave the opening talk at Finch Conf, then immediately jumped in a taxi to get to the airport to fly to Madrid, so I missed all the excellent talks. I had FOMO for a conference I actually spoke at.

I did get to spend some time at Code Motion in Madrid, but that was a waste of time. It was one of those multi-track events where the trade show floor is prioritised over the talks (and the speakers don’t get paid). I gave my talk to a mostly empty room—the classic multi-track experience. On the plus side, I had a wonderful time with Jessica exploring Madrid’s many tapas delights. The food and drink made up for the sub-par conference.

I flew back from Madrid to the UK, and immediately went straight to London to deliver the closing talk of Generate CSS. So once again, I didn’t get to see any of the other talks. That’s a real shame—it sounds like they were all excellent.

The day after Generate though, I took the Eurostar to Amsterdam. That’s where I’ve been ever since. There were just as many events as in the previous week, but because they were all in Amsterdam, I could savour them properly, instead of spending half my time travelling.

Indie Web Camp Amsterdam was excellent, although I missed out on the afternoon discussions on the first day because I popped over to the Mozilla Tech Speakers event happening at the same time. I was there to offer feedback on lightning talks. I really, really enjoyed it.

I’d really like to do more of this kind of thing. There aren’t many activities I feel qualified to give advice on, but public speaking is an exception. I’ve got plenty of experience that I’m eager to share with up-and-coming speakers. Also, I got to see some really great lightning talks!

Then it was time for View Source. There was a mix of talks, panels, and breakout conversation corners. I saw some fantastic talks by people I hadn’t seen speak before: Melanie Richards, Ali Spittal, Sharell Bryant, and Tejas Kumar. I gave the closing keynote, which was warmly received—that’s always very gratifying.

After one day of rest, it was time for Fronteers. This was where myself and Remy gave the joint talk we’ve been working on:

Neither of us is under any illusions about the nature of a joint talk. It’s not half as much work; it’s more like twice the work. We’ve both seen enough uneven joint presentations to know what we want to avoid.

I’m happy to say that it went off without a hitch. Remy definitely had the tougher task—he did a live demo. Needless to say, he did it flawlessly. It’s been a real treat working with Remy on this. Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s kind of a web hero of mine, so this was a real honour and a privilege for me.

I’ve got some more speaking engagements ahead of me. Most of them are in Europe so I’m going to do my utmost to travel to them by train. Flying is usually more convenient but it’s terrible for my carbon footprint. I’m feeling pretty guilty about that Madrid trip; I need to make ammends.

I’ll be travelling to France next week for Paris Web. Taking the Eurostar is a no-brainer for that one. Straight after that Jessica and I will be going to Frankfurt for the book fair. Taking the train from Paris to Frankfurt will be nice and straightforward.

I’ll be back in Brighton for Indie Web Camp on the weekend of October 19th and 20th—you should come!—and then I’ll be heading off to Antwerp for Full Stack Fest. Anywhere in Belgium is easily reachable by train so that’ll be another Eurostar journey.

After that, it gets a little trickier. I’ll be going to Berlin for Beyond Tellerrand but I’m not sure I can make it work by train. Same goes for Web Clerks in Vienna. Cities that far east are tough to get to by train in a reasonable amount of time (although I realise that, compared to many others, I have the luxury of spending time travelling by train).

Then there are the places that I can only get to by plane. There’s the United States. I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart in San Francisco in December. A flight is unavoidable. Last time we went to the States, Jessica and I travelled by ocean liner. But that isn’t any better for the environment, given the low-grade fuel burned by ships.

And then there’s Ireland. I make trips back there to see my mother, but there’s no alternative to flying or taking a ferry—neither are ideal for the environment. At least I can offset the carbon from my flights; the travel equivalent to putting coins in the swear jar.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not moaning about the amount of travel involved in going to conferences and workshops. It’s fantastic that I get to go to new and interesting places. That’s something I hope I never take for granted. But I can’t ignore the environmental damage I’m doing. I’ll be making more of an effort to travel by train to Europe’s many excellent web events. While I’m at it, I can ask Paul for his trainspotter expertise.

Back in the late 2000s, I used to go to Copenhagen every for an event called Reboot. It was a fun, eclectic mix of talks and discussions, but alas, the last one was over a decade ago.

It was organised by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. I hadn’t seen Thomas in years, but then, earlier this year, our paths crossed when I was back at CERN for the 30th anniversary of the web. He got a real kick out of the browser recreation project I was part of.

I few months ago, I got an email from Thomas about the new event he’s running in Copenhagen called Techfestival. He was wondering if there was some way of making the WorldWideWeb project part of the event. We ended up settling on having a stand—a modern computer running a modern web browser running a recreation of the first ever web browser from almost three decades ago.

So I showed up at Techfestival and found that the computer had been set up in a Shoreditchian shipping container. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do, so I just hung around nearby until someone wandering by would pause and start tentatively approaching the stand.

“Would you like to try the time machine?” I asked. Nobody refused the offer. I explained that they were looking at a recreation of the world’s first web browser, and then showed them how they could enter a URL to see how the oldest web browser would render a modern website.

Lots of people entered facebook.com or google.com, but some people had their own websites, either personal or for their business. They enjoyed seeing how well (or not) their pages held up. They’d take photos of the screen.

People asked lots of questions, which I really enjoyed answering. After a while, I was able to spot the themes that came up frequently. Some people were confusing the origin story of the internet with the origin story of the web, so I was more than happy to go into detail on either or both.

The experience helped me clarify in my own mind what was exciting and interesting about the birth of the web—how much has changed, and how much and stayed the same.

All of this very useful fodder for a conference talk I’m putting together. This will be a joint talk with Remy at the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks. We’re calling the talk How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days:

The World Wide Web turned 30 years old this year. To mark the occasion, a motley group of web nerds gathered at CERN, the birthplace of the web, to build a time machine. The first ever web browser was, confusingly, called WorldWideWeb. What if we could recreate the experience of using it …but within a modern browser! Join (Je)Remy on a journey through time and space and code as they excavate the foundations of Tim Berners-Lee’s gloriously ambitious and hacky hypertext system that went on to conquer the world.

Neither of us is under any illusions about the nature of a joint talk. It’s not half as much work; it’s more like twice the work. We’ve both seen enough uneven joint presentations to know what we want to avoid.

We’ve been honing the material and doing some run-throughs at the Clearleft HQ at 68 Middle Street this week. The talk has a somewhat unusual structure with two converging timelines. I think it’s going to work really well, but I won’t know until we actually deliver the talk in Amsterdam. I’m excited—and a bit nervous—about it.

Whether it’s in a shipping container in Copenhagen or on a stage in Amsterdam, I’m starting to realise just how much I enjoy talking about web history.

I was in Amsterdam again at the start of last week for the Progressive Web App Dev Summit, organised by Google. Most of the talks were given by Google employees, but not all—this wasn’t just a European version of Google I/O. Representatives from Opera, Mozilla, Samsung, and Microsoft were also there, and there were quite a few case studies from independent companies. That was very gratifying to see.

Almost all the talks were related to progressive web apps. I say, “almost all” because there were occasional outliers. There was a talk on web components, which don’t have anything directly to do with progressive web apps (and I hope there won’t be any attempts to suggest otherwise), and another on rendering performance that had good advice for anyone building any kind of website. Most of the talks were about the building blocks of progressive web apps: HTTPS, Service Workers, push notifications, and all that jazz.

I was very pleased to see that there was a move away from the suggesting that single-page apps with the app-shell architecture model were the only way of building progressive web apps.

Need to do more to change the perception that a progressive web app must be a single-page client-rendered app #pwadevsummit

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) June 21, 2016

There were lots of great examples of progressively enhancing existing sites into progressive web apps. Jeff Posnick’s talk was a step-by-step walkthrough of doing exactly that. Reading through the agenda, I was really happy to see this message repeated again and again:

In this session we’ll take an online-only site and turn it into a fully network-resilient, offline-first installable progressive web app. We’ll also break out of the app shell and look at approaches that better-suit traditional server-driven sites.

Progressive Web Apps should work everywhere for every user. But what happens when the technology and API’s are not available for in your users browser? In this talk we will show you how you can think about and build sites that work everywhere.

Progressive Web Apps should load fast, work great offline, and progressively enhance to a better experience in modern browsers.

How do you put the “progressive” into your current web app?

You can (and should!) build for the latest and greatest browsers, but through a collection of fallbacks and progressive enhancements you can bring a lot tomorrow’s web to yesterday’s browsers.

I think this is a really smart move. It’s a lot easier to sell people on incremental changes than it is to convince them to rip everything out and start from scratch (another reason why I’m dubious about any association between web components and progressive web apps—but I’ll save that for another post).

The other angle that I really liked was the emphasis on emerging markets, not just wealthy westerners. Tal Oppenheimer’s talk Building for Billions was superb, and Alex kicked the whole thing off with some great facts and figures on mobile usage.

In my mind, these two threads are very much related. Progressive enhancement allows us to have our progressive web app cake and eat it too: we can make websites that can be accessed on devices with limited storage and slow networks, while at the same time ensuring those same sites take advantage of all the newest features in the latest and greatest browsers. I talked to a lot of Google devs about ways to measure the quality of a progressive web app, and I’m coming to the conclusion that a truly high-quality site is one that can still be accessed by a proxy browser like Opera Mini, while providing a turbo-charged experience in the latest version of Chrome. If you think that sounds naive or unrealistic, then I think you might want to dive deeper into all the technologies that make progressive web apps so powerful—responsive design, Service Workers, a manifest file, HTTPS, push notifications; all of those features can and should be used in a layered fashion.

Speaking of Opera, Andreas kind of stole the show, demoing the latest interface experiments in Opera Mobile.

That ambient badging that Alex was talking about? Opera is doing it. The importance of being able to access URLs that I’ve been ranting about? Opera is doing it.

Then we had the idea to somehow connect it to the “pull-to-refresh” spinner, as a secondary gesture to the left or right.

Nice! I’m looking forward to seeing what other browsers come up with it. It’s genuinely exciting to see all these different browser makers in complete agreement on which standards they want to support, while at the same time differentiating their products by competing on user experience. Microsoft recently announced that progressive web apps will be indexed in their app store just like native apps—a really interesting move.

The Progressive Web App Dev Summit wrapped up with a closing panel, that I had the honour of hosting. I thought it was very brave of Paul to ask me to host this, considering my strident criticism of Google’s missteps.

Initially there were going to be six people on the panel. Then it became eight. Then I blinked and it suddenly became twelve. Less of a panel, more of a jury. Half the panelists were from Google and the other half were from Opera, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Samsung. Some of those representatives were a bit too media-trained for my liking: Ali from Microsoft tried to just give a spiel, and Alex Komoroske from Google wouldn’t give me a straight answer about whether he wants Android Instant apps to succeed—Jake was a bit more honest. I should have channelled my inner Paxman a bit more.

Needless to say, nobody from Apple was at the event. No surprise there. They’ve already promised to come to the next event. There won’t be an Apple representative on stage, obviously—that would be asking too much, wouldn’t it? But at least it looks like they’re finally making an effort to engage with the wider developer community.

All in all, the Progressive Web App Dev Summit was good fun. I found the event quite inspiring, although the sausage festiness of the attendees was depressing. It would be good if the marketing for these events reached a wider audience—I met a lot of developers who only found out about it a week or two before the event.

I really hope that people will come away with the message that they can get started with progressive web apps right now without having to re-architect their whole site. Right now the barrier to entry is having your site running on HTTPS. Once you’ve got that up and running, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to add a manifest file and a basic Service Worker—to boost performance if nothing else. From there, you’re in a great position to incrementally add more and more features—an offline-first approach with your Service Worker, perhaps? Or maybe start dabbling in push notifications. The great thing about all of these technologies (with the glaring exception of web components in their current state) is that you don’t need to bet the farm on any of them. Try them out. Use them as enhancements. You’ve literally got nothing to lose …and your users have everything to gain.

I’m about to have a crazy few days that will see me bouncing between Brighton and Amsterdam.

It starts tomorrow. I’m flying to Amsterdam in the morning and speaking at this Icons event in the afternoon about digital preservation and long-term thinking.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be opening up the inaugural HTML Special which is a new addition the CSS Day conference. Each talk on Thursday will cover one HTML element. I am honoured to speaking about the A element. Here’s the talk description:

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…

Enquire within upon everything.

I’ve been working all out to get this talk done and I finally wrapped it up today. Right now, I feel pretty happy with it, but I bet I’ll change that opinion in the next 48 hours. I’m pretty sure that this will be one of those talks that people will either love or hate, kind of like my 2008 dConstruct talk, The System Of The World.

After CSS Day, I’ll be heading back to Brighton on Saturday, June 18th to play a Salter Cane gig in The Greys pub. If you’re around, you should definitely come along—not only is it free, but there will be some excellent support courtesy of Jon London, and Lucas and King.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be speaking at DrupalCamp Brighton, opening up day two of the event. I won’t be able to stick around long afterwards though, because I need to skidaddle to the airport to go back to Amsterdam!

Google are having their Progressive Web App Dev Summit there on Monday on Tuesday. I’ll be moderating a panel on the second day, so I’ll need to pay close attention to all the talks. I’ll be grilling representatives from Google, Samsung, Opera, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Considering my recent rants about some very bad decisions on the part of Google’s Chrome team, it’s very brave of them to ask me to be there, much less moderate a panel in public.

You can still register for the event, by the way. Like the Salter Cane gig, it’s free. But if you can’t make it along, I’d still like to know what you think I should be asking the panelists about.

Got a burning question for browser/device makers? Write it down, post it somewhere on the web with a link back to this post, and then send me a web mention (there’s a form for you to paste in the URL at the bottom of this post).

The weather is glorious right now here in Brighton. As much as I get wanderlust, I’m more than happy to have been here for most of June and for this lovely July thus far.

Prior to the J months, I made a few European sojourns.

Mid-may was Mobilism time in Amsterdam, although it might turn out that this may have been the final year. That would be a real shame: it’s a great conference, and this year’s was no exception.

As usual, I had a lot of fun moderating a panel. This time it was a general “hot topics” panel featuring Remy, Jake, Wilto, and Dan. Smart, opinionated people: just what I want.

Two weeks after Mobilism, I was back on the continent for Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. I opened up the show with a new talk. It was quite ranty, but I was pleased with how it turned out, and the audience were very receptive. I’ll see about getting the video transcribed so I can publish the full text here.

Alas, I had to miss the second day of the conference so I could down to Porto for this year’s ESAD web talks, where I reprised the talk I had just debuted in Germany. It was my first time in Portugal and I really liked Porto: there’s a lot to explore and discover there.

Two weeks after that, I gave that same talk one last spin at FFWD.pro in Zagreb. I had never been to Croatia before and Jessica and I wanted to make the most of it, so we tagged on a trip to Dubrovnik. That was quite wonderful. It’s filled with tourists these days, but with good reason: it’s a beautiful medieval place.

With that, my little European getaways came to an end (for now). The only other conference I attended was Brighton’s own Ampersand, which was particularly fun this year. The Clearleft conferences just keep getting better and better.

In fact, this year’s Ampersand might have been the best yet. And this year’s UX London was definitely the best yet. I’d love to say that this year’s dConstruct will be the best yet, but given that last year’s was without doubt the best conference I’ve ever been to, that’s going to be quite a tall order.

Still, with this line-up, I reckon it’s going to be pretty darn great …and it will certainly be good fun. So if you haven’t yet done so, grab a ticket now and I’ll see you here in Brighton in September.

Here’s hoping the weather stays good.

The programme for this year’s Mobilism conference in Amsterdam looks hot, hot, hot! It will wrap up with that hottest of hot things: a hot topics panel. Hot!

By the way, there are still tickets available. I suggest you grab one if you haven’t already. It’s a great gathering but for some reason it’s not selling as well this year, which means this could be your last chance to attend.

I’ve really, really enjoyed the previous two Mobilisms, and I always get a kick out of moderating panels so I’m pretty chuffed about getting the chance to host a panel for the third year running.

The first year, the panel was made up of Mobile browser vendors (excluding Apple, of course). Last year, it was more of a mixed bag of vendors and developers. This year …well, we’ll see. I’ll assemble the panel over the course of the conference’s two days. I plan to choose the sassiest and most outspoken of speakers—the last thing you want on a panel is a collection of meek, media-trained company shills.

Mind you, Dan has managed to buy his way onto the panel through some kind of sponsorship deal, but I’m hoping he’ll be able to contribute something useful about Firefox OS.

Apart from that one preordained panelist, everything else is up in the air. To help me decide who to invite onto the panel, it would be really nice to have an idea of what kind of topics people want to have us discuss. Basically, what’s hot and what’s not.

So …got a burning question about mobile, the web, or the “mobile web” (whatever that means)? I want to hear it.

If you could leave a comment with your question, ‘twould be much appreciated.

I spent the last few days in the beautiful surroundings of Amsterdam for Mobilism. ‘Twas an excellent affair: a well-organised, focused single-track conference. It may have helped that Amsterdam itself was looking bloody gorgeous for the duration.

All the talks were great but I was particularly happy to finally hear Bryan and Stephanie Rieger having so often favourited their presentations on Slideshare. They both blew my mind, though I’ll admit to a certain amount of confirmation bias in hearing their Content First message.

For my part, I moderated what I believe may have been the world’s first panel dedicated to mobile browsers.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself …somewhat at the expense of the panelists. There were representatives from Opera, Nokia and RIM present, ready and willing to take their punishment. They were the ones brave enough to actually show up. Despite PPK’s best efforts, there was an Apple- and Google-shaped hole on stage. Apple never sends anyone to any event to speak on behalf of the company. And Google were clearly just too chickenshit.

So kudos to the mobile browser vendors that did have the guts to take a grilling from web developers. The panel got quite technical for a while—which you may or not find boring, depending on how much of a browser nerd you are—but once we moved on to more philosophical bigger-picture questions, it got very interesting indeed.

Luke took some notes and the whole thing has been recorded for posterity. Oh, and a big “thank you!” to everyone who took the time to answer my request for questions.

My little ausflug to Basel and Freiburg went well. It was nice to be back in the land of beer (cue Homer Simpson daydream). The pictures should be worth a few K of words.

Next week, I’ll be heading off to Amsterdam. No rest for the weekend. I’ll be attending XTech 2006. There’s an Ajax developers day at the start of the conference and I’ll be talking about Hijax.

Before that though, I have some important tasks to attend to here in Brighton. Namely, getting all my worldly belongings out of my current abode and into my new flat by the end of the week.

Jessica and I have spent the last three days going back and forth with boxes and cartons of our accumulated kipple. After hauling cardboard boxes full of CDs around, I’ve really come to appreciate the power of having an iPod. Compact Discs are just physical back-ups of my music. They take up far too much space.

So far, the move has been going okay. Happily, our new place is very close to our old place so there’s been no mucking about with vans or cars. Our phone line should get switched over tomorrow. Unfortunately, our broadband will take a while longer. That was my fault. I left it a bit late to inform my ISP of the move. Luckily for me, some kind neighbour has an unprotected wireless network that I can use to get online.

Between the hauling of boxes, preparing for my trip to the Netherlands, and having no guaranteed connection to the internet, I may appear to drop off the face of the earth for a while. Please forgive any unanswered emails and general lack of communication. Once I’m settled into my new place, things should return to something approaching normality.