Just a Spec

Congratulations! You’ve got yourself a nice little World-Wide Web site. Now it’s time to deploy it for everyone to enjoy through their World-Wide Web browser. Easy, right? WRONG! Deploying web apps today is the portal to madness and pain, with many levels of misery awaiting as you descend into the depths of Hades. Or…if you play it right, it’s little more than the press of a button. Let’s talk about that in this our Season 2 finale of Just a Spec.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Haggis Ruby, 24th October 2024 (Ayush is a speaker)
• Social Web Foundation
• Render (hosting)
• “Premature optimization is…”

It's time for some acronym soup: SSG SSR CSR SPA MPA…MEAN? SSI?? PERL??? (Officially not an acronym…) If you're coming down with a headache already, trust us, you're not alone. It's…a lot. Thankfully, Ayush and Jared are here to break it all down for you, as well as talk about some of the history behind the many different rendering modes to be found on the web and when you might reach for one or the other…or on so many projects these days, both!

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Haggis Ruby, 24th October 2024 (Ayush is a speaker)
• Follow up: i-html
• Hear also Episode 9 (“server components”, “islands”, etc.)
• Blast from the 2003 past: Review of Blosxom blogging tool
• Movable Type (Wikipedia)
• Bulma 1.0 CSS framework
• Ayush: Rails and Hotwire Codex updated

What if your backend could drive reactive UI changes on your frontend? Without dependencies? Without relying on any particular framework? What if your HTML could gain full-stack programming superpowers?

Introducing Action Web Components—inspired by clever Ajax techniques of the past & present and ready to march boldly into the future.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Haggis Ruby, 24th October 2024 (Ayush is a speaker)
• Bridgetown 2.0 Beta is out!
• Action Web Components Which Span the the Server-Client Divide (article)
  • Demo
  • Repo

How did the Internet first begin? Why was it developed at the Advanced Research Projects Agency? Where was it initially launched at the end of the 1960s? Is it pronounced r-OO-ter or r-OW-ter?? These and other hard-hitting questions are answered as Jared & Ayush take a deep dive into the birth of humanity’s global computer network…with a dash of 90s nostalgia thrown in for good measure.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Episode 15: The Plumbing That Makes the Web Move
• Packet switching (Wikipedia)
• The first Internet connection, with UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock (YouTube)
• How the Internet Was Invented: Part 1 (YouTube)
• How the Internet Came to Be | Part 2 (YouTube)
• Did the U.S. Government Invent the Internet? | History (YouTube)
• How the Internet was born: The network begins to take shape (The Conversation)
• The Internet Review (born in 1996, reborn in 2024)
• 1989 Networking Poems!

It’s been a wild, wild ride getting from the anything goes origin story of the mainstream web—anyone still remember “Netscape Navigator” and “Trumpet Winsock”?—to today’s carefully-curated experience in the age of Interop and using GitHub to achieve spec consensus.

But the relative calm we enjoy today when it comes to progress and feature parity across browser engines perhaps doesn’t quite tell the whole story…there are still threats to an open web which works well for all, protects our privacy, and guards us from bad actors.

In this episode, we look back at the history of the web browser—touching on such memorable moments as the & tags, DHTML with the launch of JavaScript, and the arrival of responsive design for mobile as well as desktop—while attempting to learn from history so that we’re not doomed to repeat it.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Wikipedia Links:
• Netscape Navigator
• Internet Explorer
  • IE for Mac
• DHTML
• Firefox
• Safari
• Chrome
• Responsive Design
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee on threats to the open web (as reported by The Internet Review)

Whoa, there was one more “State of” survey from 2023 to mine for content! Who knew? Yes, the results are in, and we talk about them…but more broadly, our feelings about the state of web frameworks in our industry and the much-ballyhooed pendulum swing back to server-side rendering and HTML-first techniques (though the rate of change is perhaps not what we might wish for).

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• State of JavaScript Survey 2023
• Our past "State of" episodes:
  • State of HTML Episode 17
  • State of CSS Episode 10

What if you could take HTML & CSS, package them up in a file, and publish that file as a singular artifact? That's essentially what ePub is. (ePUB? EPUB?) With Ayush's real-world experience publishing e-books, we are guided through understanding more about this important (and sometimes overlooked) spec. Alas, the devil's in the details, and we get into many of those details here on today's episode of Just a Spec.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• EPUB file format (Wikipedia)
• Asciidoctor publishing toolchain

When you've spent a good portion of your career as a web developer utilizing CSS processors & frameworks, what would lead you to embrace vanilla techniques and modern CSS features? This is the question in the air as we welcome our first ever guest to the show, Elise Shaffer. Elise walks us through her journey learning full-stack development via frameworks like Rails and Tailwind, and then more recently enjoying the freedom and simplicity of web platform features on the frontend. It's a celebration of doing more with less with Just a Spec.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web (vanilla CSS course) & That HTML Blog
• Elise Shaffer: Website  / Ruby on Rails Podcast
  • Episode 513: Modern Rails Apps with Ayush Newatia
• Open Props
• Tailwind v4's CSS-first config
• CUBE CSS
  • Video tutorial by Kevin Powell

The results of the State of HTML 2023 survey are in! It’s an exciting time for HTML which has seen a lot of growth and expansion of capability in a welcome break with the past (when typically CSS and especially JavaScript would leapfrog the rate of change of the Web’s foundational markup language). Still, some might say we need a lot more progress on this front, which is why these survey results—while exhibiting some pressing issues around diversity and broad industry awareness—offer vital insight into the needs of today’s Web developers. Let’s break it all down right here on Just a Spec!

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Book a 1:1 coaching session with Jared
• State of HTML 2023

Where data lives, how to retrieve data, how to change data, how to track updates to data and provide feedback accordingly to the user…in other words, state. Web application development can necessitate a wide range of possible options for how you manage state, and in this episode we look at many of the ways this may work from the server to the client and back again. You may be surprised at some of the “old-school” techniques we end up cheering on in our conversation. Also…how the blazes do you pronounce JWT?! 😂
 
 Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Whitefusion web studio (ready for hire!)
• Binary Solo — Ayush's new blog
• Just a Spec Episode 11 (Storage APIs)
• Signals are Eating the Web (video at The Spicy Web)