Thomas Powell gives a Meme peppered talk at Interactive Day San Diego about the Web and Web Dev tech focusing on how far (or not) we have come since the late 1990s.

1. THE RAPID EVOLUTION
OF WEB DEVELOPMENT
HTML5, CSS3 and Chrome 19 is so yesterday!
Or
Thomas A. Powell
tpowell@pint.com
@PINTSD

2. Who Am I?
• Yeah I worked on the Old Timey Internet
• Wrote a bunch of books
• Taught a lot people
• Web Agency Background
• Started a few successful Web Software Plays

3. Why Am I Here?
• Hoping to talk about Data Viz & Big Data
• “Too Specific. How about HTML5?”
• Ok, easy enough
• “Scratch that! Too techie, talk about
changes and trends in Web dev instead!”
• Ok...sure (head scratching)

4. Here We Are Then
• ~45 mins or so, let’s start the clock
• Time to talk about hopefully interesting things
• Sure you might be into marketing, but we need
context so let’s talk about:
• Techie stuff : HTML5, JS, Networks, etc.
• Security and Privacy
• Performance
• Trends

5. Oh and Memes

6. A Long Time Ago...
• I wrote this book on paper
• Premise: Web Sites/Apps ==
Software, thus treat dev as such
• Then : “Wow, makes sense”
• Now : “Eh...Duh”
• So we’ve evolved and fast!?

7. What Makes Web
Different?
• The Public Network
• Dev Practices
• Ownership
• Other Theories

8. The Network
• You don’t control it end to end
• Delivery time not guaranteed
• Latency is significant
• HTTP impacts
• Simple but...
• Stateless
• Slow
• Security - an after thought

9. Dev Practices
• What are those?
• Software Engineering without
_________
• Release cycles
• You mean when we change code?
• QA
• Always doing or never doing?
• Let the users tell us!

10. Owner Effects
• Strong Patron and Walled Gardens
• Many Patrons and Open Market
• Convention and consensus over
some predetermined standard
• Is there a right answer?
• Trade-offs always!

11. Theories
• It’s different because
• Easy to leave ... but
stickiness=lock-in
• Biz model ... but freemium
looks like shareware
• Distribution ... but software
is now the same
• Platform ... but browser
becomes OS
• UI Issues ... but look at
history

12. Let’s Take a Tour
• Different or not it doesn’t matter
• Time to tour the Web Dev Space
• We’ll go up and down the stack
• Visit some buzzwords
• Expose some pros and cons
• Hopefully seed many questions
for the end

13. Browser Wars
• Version Number Battle
• Chrome 19*, Firefox 13, Opera
12, and coming up last IE 10
• Near monthly releases and
nightly updates
• Tons of invented features
• Trouble: Continuous QA cycle!

14. Zombie Browsers
• Yes IE6 sucks (7/8 too)
• But did it back then?
• Consider that Chrome 19
will suck in 10 years
• Dev today for features
which you expect to be
standard which later
aren’t...what happens?

15. Browser as Platform
• Browsers have more privileged access
• File System, Geoloc, WebCam,
Gamepad, and more
• Native is ultimate goal - see Google
Native Client
• Netscape’s early vision finally realized
• Browser as OS - see Chrome OS
• Outcomes: Security, Complexity,
Portability just in new container

16. What is HTML5?
• Sad Truth: Most often a buzzword for
anything new, focused on some feature
of interest and tremendously confused
with heavy JavaScript use
• Sprawling Spec under constant change
• Evolution of HTML 4
• Acknowledges failure of XHTML
• Paves cowpaths with non-standard
to standard
• Secret Win: Tag Soup Parse Rules

17. HTML5 : Semantic Tags
• <header>, <footer>,
<section>, <article>,
<aside>, <nav>, <figure>,
<mark>, <time>
• You can easily use them
now
• HTML5 Shim, Modernizr
• Better than <div> - itis
• Outcomes: Semantics
(maybe SEO), outlining

18. HTML5 : Web Forms
• Rich Form Widgets
• Date Pickers, Color Pickers,
Sliders, Search box,
Autocomplete Lists
• Semantic Types
• email, tel, url, number
• Validation without JavaScript
• pattern, required, semantic types

19. HTML5 : Media
• <audio> and <video> tags
• Flash video begone!
• But...codec chaos
returns
• And maturity and
integration jumps
backwards

20. HTML5 : Canvas
• <canvas> tag + Canvas API using
JavaScript = Programmatic
Bitmap Graphics
• Pros: Small API and fast esp. if
GPU accelerated
• Cons: Too low level, no IE until
IE9, Not retained mode (no
picking), accessibility is bad

21. Canvas Alternatives
• SVG - tag based, retained mode,
in some cases faster
• JS DOM Animation - flexible but
can be slow
• Flash - yes Flash, get over it
• CSS Animations and Transitions
• Fast but specialized and
feature limited

22. JavaScript Everywhere
• Client-Side (with many names - DHTML,
Ajax, HTML5, etc.)
• Library Mania: jQuery, ExtJS,
Backbone,...
• Server-Side:
• node.js, silk.js, Helma, Ringo, even
classic ASP
• Mobile
• Sencha Touch, Phone Gap, ...
• Even Desktop

23. Hating on JavaScript
• It has “Ugly Parts”
• Rework it - ECMAScript5, 6, etc.
• Compile to it - Coffeescript, GWT
• It’s Slow
• Yeah and other dynamic langs?
• Great improvements:V8, Chakra
• It’s insecure
• Is it? Or is it what you are doing
with it?

24. CSS 1,2,3,4...
• Multiple Columns, Drop Shadows,
Custom Fonts, Image Borders,
Layouts, Media-Queries,
Animations, Filters!?
• CSS Bloat
• Welcome to -vendor prefix hell!
• Compilers Emerge
• Less, Sass, Stylus
• BTW CSS Variables are here too

25. Server-Side
• First stop the “____ won’t scale”
nonsense, that’s a different problem
• JavaScript to erode PHP, Ruby, Python
• All continue with C# and Java a bit
more entrenched
• More biz logic moves client-side.
• Server side becomes service layer
• REST won, URL as command line,
and JSON everywhere

26. Database Drama
• The Rise of NoSQL (ex. MongoDB)
• Lots of hype here
• Good reasons why we want it but...
• DB research and tradition thrown out
the window
• Change for sure, I expect a hybrid
winner

27. Security Challenges
• Hack traffic is nearly ambient at
this point
• Exploits are now industrialized
• Pants are down all over the place
• Anonymous is really not that
l33t
• Trust relationship are not
understood or admitted to

28. Security Face Palms
• The client-side is untrustworthy!
• You can’t can’t can’t trust inputs
• You must encrypt your transmission
• Especially given heavy public WiFi use
• Open Source is open to all (hackers included)

29. Web Security Truths
• Tech can’t solve the security problem
• There is no such thing as perfect security
• Security is a posture, not a feature
• The business model of Web security is mostly flawed

30. Delivery Woes
• Speed matters! Can never be fast
enough
• Bandwidth fallacy still reigns, but
latency is more important!
• Even 100ms can equal loss
• Client Side problems are source of >
80% of speed problems
• 3rd Party Includes and Scripts are
major problem
• Speed, Security, even SPOF!

31. Serving Changes
• Performance & scale matter!
• Apache is fading
• Others rising Ngnix,
Lighthttpd, node.js, etc.
• Protocols are changing - SPDY
• # of requests is the issue
• I/O is still a bottleneck
• CDNs use is more common

32. Analytics Shake-Up
• Reliances on JavaScript, Cookies and
3rd party hosts are quite troubling
• Lots of handwaving and conflicts of
interest
• There is increasing tracking abuse
• Regulation is coming
• EU Cookie Law
• Could be a good business
opportunity

33. Big Data != Big Wisdom
• We want to know everything!
• Storing and processing all that
data is expensive and time
consuming
• Viz helps
• Good questions help more

34. Data Driven to Disaster
• Lots of “data science” but often lack
some basic scientific thinking patterns
• Causality and correlation are quite
often confused
• Tons of confirmation bias
• Lots of sampling bias
• Crowd Wisdom is ruling a bit much
• Science isn’t easy, be skeptical

35. Mobile! Mobile! Mobile!
• Indeed huge changes!
• Mobile won’t completely rule
• On Star Trek ...
• In Japan...
• Creation vs. Consumption
• Walled Garden versus Open
Garden tension again

36. Tool/Tech Blaming
• The languages, services, tools,
hosts, etc. you use don’t make
you do dumb things we tend
to do that fine on our own
• Looking for the perfect _____
is going to be a long process
• Trade-offs exist, deal with
them

37. Implementation over
Function?
• Who cares what your app is
written in?
• Hackers? Competitors?
• What does Google or ____
use?
• Does it matter?
• BTW ever viewed Google’s
source?

38. Evaluation Solely By Looks

39. The Constant
• Being human is the constant, new
technology is the variable
• Human nature tends to trend to
norms over time
• The Web doesn’t make you (or
your kids or customers) a
smarter, super-friend making
multi-tasker

40. User General Truths
• Customer always right, listen to the
customer, nobody likes to wait, less
work-more gain, etc.
• I’ve tended to find more insight in
books like Robert Cialdini’s Influence:
The Psychology of Persuasion or
general works on General Biz, Psych,
CogSci, Interface Design, etc. then
Web specific ones
• BTW have you heard? The Web is
the real world?

41. Thanks!
&
Questions?
Thomas A. Powell
tpowell@pint.com
http://www.pint.com
Twitter: PINTSD