I went up to London for the Edge Conference on Friday. It’s not your typical conference. Instead of talks, there are panels, but not the crap kind, where nobody says anything of interest: these panels are ruthlessly curated and prepared. There’s lots of audience interaction too, but again, not the crap kind, where one or two people dominate the discussion with their own pet topics: questions are submitted ahead of time, and then you are called upon to ask it at the right moment. It’s like Question Time for the web.
Components
The first panel was on that hottest of topics: Web Components. Peter Gasston kicked it off with a superb introduction to the subject. Have a read of his equally-excellent article in Smashing Magazine to get the gist.
Needless to say, this panel covered similar ground to the TAG meetup I attended a little while back, and left me with similar feelings: I’m equal parts excited and nervous; optimistic and worried. If Web Components work out, and we get a kind emergent semantics of UI widgets, it’ll be a huge leap forward for the web. But if we end up with a Tower of Babel, things could get very messy indeed. We’ll probably get both at once. And I think that’ll be (mostly) okay.
I butted into the discussion when the topic of accessibility came up. I was a little worried about what I was hearing, which was mainly, “Oh, ARIA takes care of the accesibility.” I felt like Web Components were passing the buck to ARIA, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that ARIA can’t cover all the possible use-cases of Web Components.
I chatted about this with Derek and Nicole during the break, but I’m not sure if I was articulating my thoughts very well, so I’ll have another stab at it here:
Let me set the scene for Web Components…
Historically, HTML has had a limited vocubalary for expressing interface widgets—mostly a bunch of specialised form fields like, say, the select element. The plus side is that there’s a consensus of understanding among the browsers, so you don’t have to explain what a select element does; the browsers already know. The downside is that whenever we want to add a new interface element like input type="range", it takes time to get into browsers and through the standards process. Web Components allow you to conjure up interface elements, and you don’t have to lobby browser makers or standards groups in order to make browsers understand your newly-minted element: you provide all the behavioural and styling instructions in one bundle.
So Web Components make use of HTML, JavaScript, and (scoped) CSS. The possibility space for the HTML is infinite: if you need an element that doesn’t exist, you just invent it. The possibility space for the JavaScript is pretty close to infinite: it’s a Turing-complete language that can be wrangled to do just about anything. The possibility space for CSS isn’t infinite, but it’s pretty darn big: there’s not much you can’t do with it at this point.
What’s missing from that bundle of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are hooks for assistive technology. Up until now, this is something we’ve mostly left to the browser. We don’t have to include any hooks for assistive technology when we use a select element because the browser knows what it is and can expose that knowledge to the assistive technology. If we’re going to start making up our own interface elements, we now have to take on the responsibility of providing that information to assistive technology.
How do we that? Well, right now, our only option is to use ARIA …but the possibility space defined by ARIA is much, much smaller than HTML, JavaScript, or CSS.
That’s not a criticism of ARIA: that’s the way it was designed. It’s a reactionary technology, designed to plug the gaps where the native semantics of HTML just don’t cut it. The vocabulary of ARIA was created by looking at the kinds of interface elements people are making—tabs, sliders, and so on. That’s fine, but it can’t scale to keep pace with Web Components.
The problem that Web Components solve—the fact that it currently takes too long to get a new interface element into browsers—doesn’t have a corresponding solution when it comes to accessibility hooks. Just adding more and more predefined ARIA roles won’t cut it—we need some kind of extensible accessibility that matches the expressive power of Web Components. We don’t need a bigger vocabulary in ARIA, we need a way to define our own vocabulary—an extensible ARIA, if you will.
Hmmm… I’m still not sure I’m explaining myself very well.
Anyway, I just want to make sure that accessibility doesn’t get left behind (again!) in our rush to create a new solution to our current problems. With Web Components still in their infancy, this feels like the right time to raise these concerns.
That highlights another issue, one that Nicole picked up on. It’s really important that the extensible web community and the accessibility community talk to each other.
Frankly, the accessibility community can be its own worst enemy sometimes. So don’t get me wrong: I’m not bringing up my concerns about the accessibility of Web Components in order to cry “fail!”—I just want to make sure that it’s on the table (and I’m glad that Alex is one of the people driving Web Components—his history with Dojo reassures me that we can push the boundaries of interface widgets on the web without leaving accessibility behind).
Anyway …that’s enough about that. I haven’t mentioned all the other great discussions that took place at Edge Conference.
Developer Tooling
The Web Components panel was followed by a panel on developer tools. This was dominated by representatives from different browsers, each touting their own set of in-browser tools. But the person who I really wanted to rally behind was Kenneth Auchenberg. He quite rightly asks why our developer tools and our text editors are two different apps. And rather than try to put text editors into developer tools, what we really want is to pull developer tools into our text editors …all the developer tools from all the browsers, not just one set of developer tools from one specific browser.
If you haven’t seen Kenneth’s presentation from Full Frontal, I urge you to watch it or listen to it.
I had my hand up to jump into the discussion towards the end, but time ran out so I didn’t get a chance. Paul came over afterwards and asked what I was going to say. Here’s what I told him…
I’m fascinated by the social dynamics around how browsers get made. This is an area where different companies are simultaneously collaborating and competing.
Broadly speaking, the feature set of a web browser can be divided into two buckets:
In one bucket, you’ve got the support for standards like HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Now, individual browsers might compete on how quickly or how thoroughly they get those standards implemented, but at this point, there’s no disagreement about the fact that proprietary crap is bad, standards are good, and that no matter how painful the process can be, browser makers all need to get together and work on standards together. Heck, even Apple can’t avoid collaborating on this stuff.
In the other bucket, you’ve got all the stuff that browsers compete against each other with: speed, security, the user interface, etc. A lot of this takes place behind closed doors, and that’s fine. There’s no real need for browser makers to collaborate on this stuff, and it could even hurt their competetive advantage if they did collaborate.
But here’s the problem; developer tools seem to be coming out of that second bucket instead of the first. There doesn’t seem to be much communication between the browser makers on developer tools. That’s fine if you see developer tools as an opportunity for competition, but it’s lousy if you see developer tools as an opportunity for interoperability.
This is why Kenneth’s work is so important. He’s crying out for more interoperability between browsers when it comes to developer tools. Why can’t they all use the same low-level APIs under the hood? Then they can still compete on how pretty their dev tools look, without making life miserable for developers who want to move quickly between browsers.
As painful as it might be, I think that browser makers should get together in some semi-formalised way to standardise this stuff. I don’t think that the W3C or the WHATWG are necessarily the right places for this kind of standardisation, but any kind of official cooperation would be good.
Build Process
The panel on build processes for front-end development kicked off with Gareth saying a few words. Some of those words included the sentence:
Make is probably older than you.
Cue glares from me and Scott.
Gareth also said that making websites means making software. We’re all making software—live with it.
This made me nervous. I’ve always felt that one of the great strengths of the web has been its low barrier to entry. The idea of a web that can only be made by qualified software developers doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.
Fortunately, things got cleared up later on. Somebody else asked a question about whether the barrier to entry was being raised by the complexity of tools like preprocessors, compilers, and transpilers. The consensus of the panel was that these are power tools for power users. So if someone were learning to make a website from scratch, you wouldn’t start them off with, say, Sass, without first learning CSS.
It was a fun panel, made particulary enjoyable by the presence of Kyle Simpson. I like the cut of his jib. Alas, I didn’t get the chance to tell him that in person. I had to duck out of the afternoon’s panels to get back to Brighton due to unforeseen family circumstances. But I did manage to catch some of the later panels on the live stream.
Closing thoughts
A common thread I noticed amongst many of the panels was a strong bias for decantralisation, rather than collaboration. That was most evident with Web Components—the whole point is that you can make up your own particular solution rather than waiting for a standards body. But it was also evident in the Developer Tools line-up, where each browser maker is reinventing the same wheels. And when it came to Build Process, it struck me that everyone is scratching their own itch instead of getting together to work on an itch solution.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of Darwinian approach to solving our problems, but it does seem a bit wasteful. Mairead Buchan was at Edge Conference too and she noticed the same trend. Sounds like she’s going to do something about it too.