"Web Browsers: Om nom nom" by Steve Klabnik →

Steve is an excellent speaker. He has a melodic voice and is marvelously well-spoken. You might think this would make his talks riveting, and you’d be right. This talk is no different, even though it’s about the seemingly uninteresting topic of web standards.

The core message of this talk, as I understand it, is a call to arms around making browsers extensible with JavaScript. Part one is to make them extensible at all (nothing like Chrome Browser Extensions now, but a much more fundamental render-level extensibility). Part two is to allow it in JavaScript.

The idea here is to allow web developers – those who are using the browser APIs every day – to affect the innovations of the browsers. Steve describes what he envisions:

So, [web developers] build new features for the browser in JavaScript. From that, once we have a feature that we’re happy with, we submit it to the W3C for specification. Then after it becomes specified, browser vendors implement this natively. So what’s cool about this is that it inverts this power structure. [Web developers] drive the standards process rather than the browser vendors. They don’t have to imagine features anymore and you get a polyfill on day one.

A truly revolutionary idea. I hope to see this become reality.

As a side note, I also love Steve’s jabs at Google:

Google is the biggest threat to a free and open web, just so you all know. I know they give you free email, so you love them, but they’re worst than Microsoft ever was.

A classic watch – would certainly recommend you take the twenty minutes and thirty seconds to listen to Steve’s talk.