Gathering the Web tribes together for the common good

Not focusing on in fighting, but out fighting!

Ben and I are often trying to honestly reflect on the power of the Web, and where the platform fits in with the big picture in 2013.

In the middle of a great chat about Blink, I see this gem from Paul Irish, who I feel also has very honest reflections:

“For me, seeing the mobile web be successful trumps language wars and certainly quibbling over syntax. So I’m happy to see developers embrace the authoring advantages of Coffeescript, the smart subset of JavaScript strict mode, the legendary Emscripten & asm.js combo, the compiler feedback of TypeScript and the performance ambitions of Dart. It’s worth trying out technologies that can leapfrog the current expectations of the user experience that we can deliver. Our web is worth it.”

The Web is a very diverse place, with many tribes. We have all read the books, or seen the movies, where a powerful player tries to get the tribes to all kill each other, making their life a lot easier. The flip side to this is when the tribes band together under a common cause and use their diversity as a weapon. This is what we need to do. I have said before that I think we need to use HTML5 as a jewel that we need to cut into a weapon. Bring that to the current day and we are talking about the entire Web.

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We have a ton of innovation going on in the Web right now. This includes the tech that Paul mentions above (asm.js, CS, etc) and also the grouping of work that fits in nicely to Web Components.

There were two great sessions on Web Components that you should checkout. First we have an intro to it all, and then we have an early look at an approach that wraps it all together and also polyfills to some of the past browsers, allowing you to use it now vs. “some time”. There is still work to be done, and I am not sure how I feel about any performance impact of the HTTP links to resources (need to think about the grouping), and the inline JS, but I think this will all get worked out.

What is so exciting about this world is glimpsed in the examples where components from different frameworks are used together. A bane in the world of the Web has been this situation:

I really like component A from Dojo, but my base is jQuery, and there is this other cool widget from Prototype

Ever had those thoughts? If we can finally get the right abstractions in the platform we can bring the tribes together, and the work that they do will grow by seeing that work combine.

Come on tribes. Let’s do this thing.Time to fight for the user.

Speaking of Google I/O talks by the way: one of the best talks by far from last weeks Google I/O was Paul showing us how freaking awesome the Chrome Dev Tools are getting. Watch the video.