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Articles by Brian Kardell
The Blessing of the Strings
Trusted Types have been a proposal by Google for quite some time at this point, but it's currently getting a lot of attention and work in all browsers (Igalia is working on implementations in WebKit and Gecko, sponsored by Salesforce and Google, respectively). I've been looking at it a lot and thought it's probably something worth writing about. The Trusted Types proposal rides atop Content Security Policy (CSP) and allows website maintainers to say "require trusted-types".
A quick introduction to the WPE WebKit Project
As mentioned in a previous post here and also in the related post from the WPE WebKit blog, the WPE project is a port of WebKit which, at the time of this writing, is responsible for bringing WebKit to millions of embedded devices around the world: you can find it in set-top-boxes, cars, cooking machines, and smart home appliances, to name a few examples.
The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
Part I Chapter 9 Date published: Last updated: Reviewed by Eric A. Meyer and Philip Jägenstedt Analyzed by Rick Viscomi and Kevin Farrugia Introduction In 2019, the Mozilla Developer Network’s (MDN) Product Advisory Board put together a significant survey of over 28,000 developers and designers from 173 countries. Findings from this were published as the first Web Developer Needs Assessment (Web DNA).
Where Browsers Come From
Starting a conversation about our future We’ve never really just sold the browser, we’ve always subsidized browser development in other ways. I’m definitely not suggesting that users should have to pay to download and use a web browser, but I do think it’s useful to realize that that doesn’t exactly make browsers free either. Instead, it spreads out costs some other way that obscures those details from the conversation.
Achievement Unlocked: Intent to Mathify
We are about to reach a very unique and honestly pretty epic moment in standards history, and most people probably won’t even notice. It’s also personally meaningful to me, so I’d like to tell you about it and why it’s worth celebrating it… Igalia just filed an Intent to Ship support for MathML-Core in Chromium. If you’re not familliar with what an intent to ship means - the blink release process involves several stages before something gets to ship.
Happy birthday, WPE WebKit!
WebKit is the purring engine of Safari, it’s true, but it has numerous ports and many contributors. These ports are used for all sorts of things, from powering Sony PlayStations to driving millions of embedded devices all over the world. Embedded use cases like smart home appliances, digital signage, and automotive displays are largely possible thanks to WPE WebKit, the official port of WebKit specifically optimized for embedded devices.
UA gotta be kidding
How did it get so complicated? HTTP's first RFC 1945 was 1996. Section 10.15 defined the User Agent header as a tokenized string which it said wasn't required, but you should send it. Its intent was for Seems reasonable enough, and early browsers did that ecxactly as expected. So we got things like NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and we could count how many of our users were using that (statistical purposes). But the web was new and there were lots of browsers popping up.
Webrise
Something in a recent piece by Jeremy Keith really clicked with something I’ve been thinking about, so I thought I’d write about it. Recently Jeremy Keith published “The State of the Web”. It’s based on an opening talk from the An Event Apart Spring Summit earlier this year. He’s also made it available in audio format. Jeremy is a great story teller/writer/speaker, so it is unsurpringly a delightful read/listen, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.
Can I :has()
As you might know, my company (Igalia) works on all of the web engines and we contribute a lot. I'm very proud of all of the things we're able to do to improve both the features of the web platform, and the overall health of this commons. I'm especially pleased when this lets us tackle historically hard problems.
Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health
Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health For many years, we've seen lots of blog posts and conversation on the topic of "browser engine diversity". I'd like to offer a slightly tilted view of this based instead on "the health of the ecosystem", and explain why I think this is more valuable measure and way to discuss these topics. Back in January, Jeremy Keith compared the complexity of browser engine diversity to political systems...
Toward Responsive Elements
Toward Responsive Elements In this piece I'll talk about the "Container Queries" problem, try to shine some light on some misconceptions, and tell you about the state of things. As developers, watching standards can be frustrating. We might learn of some new spec developing, some new features landing that you weren't even aware of - maybe many of these are even things you don't actually care much about.
The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
Part I Chapter 3 Reviewed by Simon Pieters, Tommy Hodgins, and Matthew Phillips Introduction In 2005, Ian "Hixie" Hickson posted some analysis of markup data building upon various previous work. Much of this work aimed to investigate class names to see if there were common informal semantics that were being adopted by developers which it might make sense to standardize upon. Some of this research helped inform new elements in HTML5. 14 years later, it's time to take a fresh look.
Beyond Browser Vendors
Beyond Browser Vendors I'd like to explain what I think is potentially the most exciting set of changes that have taken place in the latter stages of the Web's history: Why we are now collectively considerably more in control of our own destinies and have moved "beyond browser vendors". For most of the history of the Web, browser vendors have played an exceptionally critical role in standardization. This isn't a secret, in fact, it's widely discussed. What is less widely discussed is why that is.
Harold Crick and the Web Platform
Harold Crick and the Web Platform In this piece I'll talk about MathML and why I think that it is especially unique, intersting, and stranger than fiction - as well as what we can/should do with it.
I Heart Glitch
I Heart Glitch Today marks exactly one month since I started playing with Glitch, and I'd like to tell you about why I love it and can't stop playing with it. I want to say up front that this piece about pining for glory days that I don't actally remember existing when all you needed to know was HTML and CSS. If that was all you needed then, it's all you need now too.
The jQuery Foundation and Standards
Over the years the jQuery Foundation has worked to give web developers a meaningful voice in the standards process. That’s why we’re excited to help formally establish our involvement in chapters.io, an effort that allows us to work with meetups and supporters around the globe to help developers learn more about recent standards and discuss current proposals.
Sex, Houdini and the Extensible Web
When the Web was created, it was a really big idea: Tim Berners-Lee proposed (it wasn’t a standard yet) a worldwide system to retrieve documents coded in such a way that one document could link to another document. Although the idea was big, it was really simple. It was declarative and forgiving and had a clear, familiar mental model.
Pandora's box model - O'Reilly Radar
This post is part of my personal notes about the benefits currently specified in Shadow DOM, but contentious and held up in committee. We’ll work it out in standards, I’m sure — but given the number of things Shadow DOM was addressing, it may still be several years until we have solutions widely implemented and deployed that solve all of them. This has me doing a lot of thought exercises about what can be done in the meantime.
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