Fronteers 2011 – Alex Russel “Data, semantics & the process of progress”

The process of change

• We want to our toys and we want them right now, but we’re stuggling with the adoption risk:
  • Lock-in risk: is this feature a standard?
  • Run-time risk: we want it to perform!
  • Mission or rechnical risks: we nee configurable and extensible APIs
• Evolution thrives on iteration, without regular browser updates we can’t use new features
• Solutions to stalled evolution:
  • Plan A: an evolving platfrom
  • Plan B: frameworks and compilers (polyfills, js-libraries, pre-processors, etc)
• We should focus on taking advantage of new stuff, because there will be more future than there was past
• We need checkpoints but we need to keep feeding the process of change
• We thrive on shared ambiguity: HTML doesn’t mean anything by itself, but we agree on what it means and therefor it has meaning

Web components & model-driven views

• Web components allow us to define our own elements like <x-comment></x-comment> with it’s
  own internal shadow dom, default styling and scripted behaviour.
• Model-driven views is basically templating directly in HTML. Data can be fed to these views directly from HTML or by JS