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Shop Talk Show

699: Jeremy Keith on Web Day Out

58 min episode · 2 min read
·
Jeremy Keith

Episode

58 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Software Development, Product & Tech Trends

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Baseline Browser Support: Google's Baseline initiative provides two tiers for feature adoption: newly available (just shipped in all browsers) and widely available (stable for 18+ months). Organizations should use Baseline as a starting point, not final decision, then evaluate whether features are progressive enhancements or mission-critical before implementation. Clearleft publishes their browser support policy at browsersupport.clearleft.com using this framework.
  • Declarative Web APIs: Modern web development benefits when features exist in both declarative (HTML/CSS) and imperative (JavaScript) versions. The declarative version should cover 80% of use cases, like HTML form validation handling required fields and email types, while JavaScript handles complex edge cases. Geolocation and web share APIs need declarative versions rather than separate elements for each feature.
  • Framework Lock-in Problem: React and similar frameworks create bottlenecks where developers cannot use browser features until framework support ships. Document.startViewTransition provides a clean API, but React requires wrapping it in framework-specific components. Browser support matters less to organizations than framework support, creating artificial delays in adopting widely-available features. Developers using raw web standards remain locked out of nothing.
  • Command Palette Pattern: Command-K interfaces proliferate across websites, triggering a palette overlay with keyboard shortcuts. These should use the dialogue element instead of divs because browsers automatically trap focus within dialogue elements when open, preventing users from accidentally interacting with underlying content. This represents asking browsers to handle complex interaction patterns rather than reimplementing them in JavaScript.
  • CSS Adoption Cycles: CSS receives concentrated development attention in waves, with interop initiatives shipping features within one to two years versus previous decade-long timelines. Developers experience fatigue similar to JavaScript fatigue from 2015-2018 when ECMAScript shipped new versions every six months. The cycle now shifts toward HTML features like dialogue elements, invokers, and web components.

What It Covers

Jeremy Keith discusses Web Day Out, a single-day conference in Brighton on March 12, 2025, focused on browser-native web platform features developers can use immediately in production. The conversation covers modern CSS capabilities, HTML APIs, browser support strategies, and the tension between framework-dependent development versus direct browser API usage.

Key Questions Answered

  • Baseline Browser Support: Google's Baseline initiative provides two tiers for feature adoption: newly available (just shipped in all browsers) and widely available (stable for 18+ months). Organizations should use Baseline as a starting point, not final decision, then evaluate whether features are progressive enhancements or mission-critical before implementation. Clearleft publishes their browser support policy at browsersupport.clearleft.com using this framework.
  • Declarative Web APIs: Modern web development benefits when features exist in both declarative (HTML/CSS) and imperative (JavaScript) versions. The declarative version should cover 80% of use cases, like HTML form validation handling required fields and email types, while JavaScript handles complex edge cases. Geolocation and web share APIs need declarative versions rather than separate elements for each feature.
  • Framework Lock-in Problem: React and similar frameworks create bottlenecks where developers cannot use browser features until framework support ships. Document.startViewTransition provides a clean API, but React requires wrapping it in framework-specific components. Browser support matters less to organizations than framework support, creating artificial delays in adopting widely-available features. Developers using raw web standards remain locked out of nothing.
  • Command Palette Pattern: Command-K interfaces proliferate across websites, triggering a palette overlay with keyboard shortcuts. These should use the dialogue element instead of divs because browsers automatically trap focus within dialogue elements when open, preventing users from accidentally interacting with underlying content. This represents asking browsers to handle complex interaction patterns rather than reimplementing them in JavaScript.
  • CSS Adoption Cycles: CSS receives concentrated development attention in waves, with interop initiatives shipping features within one to two years versus previous decade-long timelines. Developers experience fatigue similar to JavaScript fatigue from 2015-2018 when ECMAScript shipped new versions every six months. The cycle now shifts toward HTML features like dialogue elements, invokers, and web components.

Notable Moment

A React developer at FFConf proudly explained his complex JavaScript solution for modularizing CSS across departments to prevent interference. When Jeremy mentioned cascade layers, the developer had never heard of it. After investigating during the break, he returned amazed that this native CSS feature solved exactly the problem his team spent months engineering around.

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Episode Transcript

Hey there, Shop Maniacs. How are you doing? Welcome to another episode of the Shop Talk Show. I'm Dave Rupert with me as Chris Query, Chris. Hey. 699, actually. I just saw it. I don't know why that does that feel cool? Is that, like, it's, like, the sexy number and another nine, which is, like, extra sexy? Yeah. It's kind of, like, yeah. Elicit, I will say. Yeah. It's very illicit. Yeah. Well, we have the I was gonna, you know, I was gonna say we have the Internet zone, Jeremy Keith here, but I'm really gonna say the the web zone, Jeremy Keith. Hi, Jeremy, by the way. Oh, hi. Thank you for the clarity in that, Chris. I appreciate that. That's good. Yeah. Like, could you can you imagine there's probably people that work heavily on the Internet? Like, they're Internet people who have nothing to do with the web. Yeah. Right? Like, they just I don't know. They just they are they are really into some other protocol that happens to Smurf about the the wires of the Internet, but just don't really care about the the HTTP part. Every every native app developer, I guess, is an Internet developer, technically, but not a web developer. Is that that that not oh, man. We're already in it. We we already spent in it. That that delta it's like, your app is a bunch of web views. Like, why you're and you're like, oh, my data wrap about. It's just just HTML all up and down. You know? Oh, that drives But is it convoluted? I know we're just in it, but deal with it, people. You've you've been listening to the show for a while, so you know the deal. You even though your web let's say it isn't web views, it really is, like, swift or whatever crap or Java. It still likely is making, like, fetch requests or whatever the swift to, like, to your little through your drizzle to your Postgres or whatever. And those really are using, like, Internet addresses Protocol. To access that data. Right? So that that part is Webby. Or could you, like, not do that too? Like, like, if you're if yours doesn't You totally just use HTTP. Yeah. But none of that matters. None of that matters because what matters is, can I link to it? Does it have a URL? It's the URL that makes it the web in my opinion. Heck, yeah. That's my hot take. I feel feel feel feel are not as protective as they should be about URLs. We need, like, the the URL gang where we're, like, really mad when stuff doesn't have URLs. To this day, it it bugs me. Like, even though I'm, like, I use Instagram and stuff sometimes, at least that crap has URLs unless it's like a a story or whatever. And then I think sometimes stories do, but sometimes they just disappear. Like, who in …

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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode

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Tools

  • by Google

    Google's Baseline initiative provides two tiers for feature adoption: newly available (just shipped in all browsers) and widely available (stable for 18+ months).
  • by Clearleft

    Clearleft publishes their browser support policy at browsersupport.clearleft.com using this framework.

other

  • Jeremy Keith discusses Web Day Out, a single-day conference in Brighton on March 12, 2025, focused on browser-native web platform features developers can use immediately in production.
  • A React developer at FFConf proudly explained his complex JavaScript solution for modularizing CSS across departments to prevent interference.

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