Just a Spec

Join us for a meaty conversation all about the various levels of specifications and conventions which make the World-Wide Web go: from TCP/IP to HTTP to WebSockets and beyond. We also talk about conventions in various languages and frameworks to enable building web applications servers in a straightforward and portable manner, as well as building a personal knowledge base wiki out of Markdown files and an SSG (Static-Site Generator). Let’s fly!

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!)
• The Rails and Hotwire Codex, updated!

Internet Specs:

• TCP/IP
• HTTP
• WebSocket
• Server-Sent Events (SSE)
• Old-school: Comet
• Old-school: CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
• Ruby: Rack
• JavaScript: H3 & Nitro
• Book: Where Wizards Stay Up Late
• ICANN and the 7 Keys to the Internet
• Episode 6: TIL About gTLDs, FTW!
• IANA Key Signing Ceremonies

Oh yes, we’re back! In this first Just a Spec episode of the year, the lads speculate on the grand conspiracy behind the results publication delay of State of HTML 2023 (not really!), catch up on personal news from during the podcast’s year-end hiatus, and run through a very entertaining list of all the goodies being worked on by browser vendors as part of Interop 2024. And is the complexity of the web platform just too damn high? (At least for anyone wanting to author a new browser engine?) Let’s discuss!

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
• Fullstack Ruby rebooted
• Whitefusion web studio (ready for hire!)
• The Rails and Hotwire Codex, updated!

Interop 2024:

• Readme
• Progress Dashboard
• Igalia Chats episode
• Accessibility
• CSS Nesting
• Custom Properties
• Popover
• Relative Color Syntax
• @starting-style
• text-wrap: balance

Thanksgiving’s coming up here in the U.S. and we thought it’d be fun to talk about of our favorite aspects of the modern web (and how it compares to the “dark days” of old). In addition, Jared’s launched a brand-new course platform over at The Spicy Web with the first offering being a deep-dive into crafting vanilla CSS architectures and formulating design systems. We talk about that and a bunch of the technical details of the underlying DIY platform. Enjoy this special edition of Just a Spec!

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links & Show Notes

Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon

Ayush’s thankful for:

• Modern web hosting like Render.com
• The fetch and pushState APIs
• CSS Flexbox & Grid
• A brief history of web layout
  • Old-school framesets/frames — they still work! 🤯

Jared’s thankful for:

• Mobile touchscreens, HTML5 (bye Flash!), and Responsive/Intrinsic Design
• CSS3 (rounded corners! gradients! shadows! animations!)

Introducing CSS Nouveau: a vanilla CSS architecture course Jared has published on The Spicy Web

• Technical details:
  • Built with Bridgetown & Roda
  • Turbo Streams with custom actions
  • Heartml fullstack web components (library coming soon!)
  •  Shoelace & Open Props
  •  Media Chrome audio player
  •  RhinoEditor (covered on That HTML Blog)
  •  Playground Elements

Ah yes, that notorious hard problem in computer science. Time to name some things as we talk abut the philosophy undergirding software development, why “naming things” is hard but also a core aspect of the job, the sometimes reluctance to name things in as disciplined a fashion on the frontend as on the backend, how to communicate across teams and stakeholders via Ubiquitous Language, the importance of embracing modern HTML & CSS semantics when naming things, and so much more.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links:

• Follow up: Playwright E2E testing
• TwoHardThings
• UbiquitousLanguage
• Classnames (Naming things needn’t be hard)
• How to Think Like a Framework Developer
• Adam Wathan on "vanilla" CSS
• Vanilla Breeze
• The Design System Ecosystem

A whole grab bag of topics today! We talk about some of the well-known storage APIs like localStorage and sessionStorage, as well as the newer IndexedDB API which pairs well with Service Workers. We also talk about the three Observer APIs to help with reacting to DOM mutations, scrolling, and size changes. Apparently fetch DID happen (!), and testing against three headless browsers at once in a fast and reliable manner is easier than ever. All that and more in today’s episode of Just a Spec.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links:

• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog (Jared)
• Radioactive Toy (Ayush)
• Web Storage API
• IndexedDB
• Service Workers
• Observer APIs:
  • MutationObserver
  • IntersectionObserver
  • ResizeObserver
• XMLHTTPRequest superseded by fetch
• Testing web components in headless browsers with web-test-runner
  • Gist to aid in setting everything up
• Using theme-color meta tag
• Large, small, and dynamic viewport units

The results of the 2023 State of CSS survey are in, and we're here to break it all down and uncover the most interesting nuggets and opportunities as we look ahead to the future of CSS and the web platform. But not before some spicy meta chat on open source governance and how frequent contributors are treated in light of the recent Hotwire Turbo / TypeScript debacle.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links:

• That HTML Blog (Jared)
• Radioactive Toy (Ayush)
• Turbo:
  • Remove DHH for CoC Violations - Issue #977
  • “Open Source is Not About You”
• CSS:
  • State of CSS 2023
  • Awards
• Conferences Ayush is speaking at:
  • wroclove.rb
  • Friendly.rb

The lads are back with an action-packed episode full of juicy details about “buildless” architecture & “Turbo” architecture, server components, tools & techniques which encourage server-rendered HTML pages and fragments sent over the wire, making websites which work without JavaScript, the huge pendulum shift we see in the industry back to coupled fullstack DX, and so much more. Grab your notepad because there’s a lot of ground to cover!

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links:

• That HTML Blog (Jared)
• Fresh Fusion Podcast (Jared)
• Radioactive Toy (Ayush)
• HTML over the wire tooling:
  • Hotwire
  • htmx
  • Alpine.js
  • Unpoly
• Rails World: website / repo
• View Transitions API
• Astro riffing off it
• Turbo Permanent
• Ryan Carniato stream on MPAs vs. SPAs
• A haiku on React Server Components
• Redwood.js…whoops, our bad!

Gather ’round the accessibility tree, dear listeners, and hear a grand tale about roles and attributes, screen readers and DOM inspectors, and how to be a good A11Y. We also touch on why accessibility isn’t something you bolt on after you design a website but is part of the process from the very beginning.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links:

• Want to keep the discussion going?
  • Join the The Spicy Web Discord Server
  • Follow @[email protected] on Mastodon
• HTML Design Principles: Priority of Constituencies
• WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
• The Accessibility Tree
• ARIA Resources for Developers
• ARIA Attributes (MDN Docs)
• ARIA Roles (MDN Docs)

Additional resources:

• Adrian Roselli
• Common ARIA mistakes and how to avoid them
• (No ARIA is better than bad ARIA!)
• WebAIM - web accessibility in mind
• Basecamp Accessibility Guidelines
• The Patchability of the Open Web
• (aka the “Right to Inspect”)

We're here to deep dive into the technical underpinnings of everyone's FAVORITE internet technology: email. ;-P

Amaze your nerd friends with all the exciting trivia you will learn in this action-packed episode!

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links:

• From Ayush:
  • Scattergun
  • The Rails and Hotwire Codex
• Scary weather 😟 Rhodes wildfires - Andy Bell
• History of email - Wikipedia
• CompuServe - Wikipedia
• The Unknown Story of How Hotmail Grew to 12 Million Users in 1.5 Years
• Do all email clients use "In-Reply-To" field in email header?
• What are DMARC, DKIM, and SPF?
• Want to keep the discussion going?
  • Join the The Spicy Web Discord Server

It’s hard to imagine in this current world of any dot-something you could possibly imagine when looking to register a domain name, but there was once a past era of the internet when all we had was .com, .net, and .org. A dark time. A sad time. How did we get there in the first place? And how did we eventually arrive here at today’s promised land? Join us for this rousing episode all about: gTLDs! (and IANA, and ICANN, and IETF, and…)

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush

Links

• ICANN Archives: Top-level Domains
• Generic top-level domain (Wikipedia)
• scattergun.email
• whitefusion.studio
• radioactivetoy.tech
• bridgetownconf.rocks
• youdontneedreact.com
• youdontneedtailwindcss.com