975: What’s Missing From the Web Platform?
Episode
50 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Leadership, Design & UX, Artificial Intelligence
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Customizable Select Element: The web platform now provides a customizable select element allowing full CSS control while maintaining accessibility and keyboard navigation without JavaScript dependencies. This primitive enables developers to style dropdowns completely, with combo box and multi-select variants currently in development, eliminating the need for heavy third-party component libraries for basic UI patterns.
- ✓Cookie Consent API Necessity: The web desperately needs standardized browser APIs for cookie consent management to replace the current mess of poorly coded banners with dark patterns. A native consent API would store user preferences directly in the browser, eliminating repetitive popups across sites. Sentry exemplifies best practices by removing all tracking cookies from their website, requiring consent banners only for embedded content like YouTube videos.
- ✓TypeScript Native Integration: TypeScript has become the de facto standard for JavaScript development, with proposals for types-as-comments allowing browsers to ignore type annotations rather than execute them. Node already supports running TypeScript files natively without transpilation. The browser vendors are taking time to evaluate the approach rather than rushing implementation, learning from past mistakes like premature jQuery standardization attempts.
- ✓Local AI Model Access: Future browser APIs should enable access to device-native AI models for private, free inference while allowing developers to swap in custom models or external APIs. This approach would enable instant natural language processing for tasks like parsing date inputs, validating postal codes, and fixing common form errors without sending data externally or incurring API costs per request.
- ✓Reactive Templates as Primitives: Browsers need native reactive templating where variables automatically update DOM elements when changed, eliminating the need for framework overhead in simple applications. Currently developers must either use full frameworks or manually create rerender functions. This primitive would enable lightweight interactive applications without installing React, Vue, or similar libraries for basic state-to-DOM synchronization patterns.
What It Covers
Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski examine missing features from the web platform, covering needed UI primitives like customizable selects and toggles, JavaScript syntax additions including TypeScript integration and pipe operators, essential APIs for cookies and identity, CSS improvements, browser engine debates, and future AI integration possibilities for local model access.
Key Questions Answered
- •Customizable Select Element: The web platform now provides a customizable select element allowing full CSS control while maintaining accessibility and keyboard navigation without JavaScript dependencies. This primitive enables developers to style dropdowns completely, with combo box and multi-select variants currently in development, eliminating the need for heavy third-party component libraries for basic UI patterns.
- •Cookie Consent API Necessity: The web desperately needs standardized browser APIs for cookie consent management to replace the current mess of poorly coded banners with dark patterns. A native consent API would store user preferences directly in the browser, eliminating repetitive popups across sites. Sentry exemplifies best practices by removing all tracking cookies from their website, requiring consent banners only for embedded content like YouTube videos.
- •TypeScript Native Integration: TypeScript has become the de facto standard for JavaScript development, with proposals for types-as-comments allowing browsers to ignore type annotations rather than execute them. Node already supports running TypeScript files natively without transpilation. The browser vendors are taking time to evaluate the approach rather than rushing implementation, learning from past mistakes like premature jQuery standardization attempts.
- •Local AI Model Access: Future browser APIs should enable access to device-native AI models for private, free inference while allowing developers to swap in custom models or external APIs. This approach would enable instant natural language processing for tasks like parsing date inputs, validating postal codes, and fixing common form errors without sending data externally or incurring API costs per request.
- •Reactive Templates as Primitives: Browsers need native reactive templating where variables automatically update DOM elements when changed, eliminating the need for framework overhead in simple applications. Currently developers must either use full frameworks or manually create rerender functions. This primitive would enable lightweight interactive applications without installing React, Vue, or similar libraries for basic state-to-DOM synchronization patterns.
Notable Moment
The hosts reveal that Canadian postal code inputs create validation nightmares because the format alternates between letters and numbers, forcing iOS users to constantly switch keyboards while dealing with inconsistent capitalization and spacing requirements. They argue this exemplifies why local AI models should handle input parsing, automatically understanding any format users enter without rigid validation rules.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about what is missing from the web platform. The the web platform, JavaScript, CSS, browsers, runtimes, syntax, APIs, all of that stuff. The last, I don't know, maybe two or three years, we've gotten this this massive swath of of APIs that if if you walk up to most developers and say, hey. Like like, what do you need? What's missing? A lot of people will go, like, men, things are actually in a pretty good shape, but there's still a handful of things that are are missing from the web, from us being able to build the best apps possible. So what we're gonna do is we asked, we asked on Twitter. Me and Scott have a huge list ourselves, the big wish list. We're gonna go through all of the different things that we wish we had from, like, primitives in the UI, different types of syntax we'd like to see added to to JavaScript, different APIs we'd like added, Bluetooth, serial, NFC, and then CSS browsers as well as, of course, we'll talk about the AI access, and what those APIs might even look like in the browser. My name is Wes Bos. I'm a developer from Canada. With me, as always, is Scott Talinski. Scott's a little hurt today. Wanna give us the lowdown? I don't you know, I'm always hurty. I feel like, I feel like every other episode we do, I got some something going on. Some ailment. Some ailment. Yeah. No. I had a I had an elective surgery done. I couldn't breathe. I had a deviated septum, so they had to go in and, let I'll I'll I'll save any of the gory details. They open things up and fixed all that stuff. Right up? Yeah. So I can breathe. Like, I I was snoring and stuff, and it's not like sleep apnea. It's just because I broke my nose or whatever happened. Recovery is not usually that bad. I was supposed to be good by, like, Saturday, Sunday, you know, after a surgery on Wednesday. And for the most part, my nose feels great, but I had some from the trachea they put in. My throat is all jacked. So I got I got throat numbness going on. I'm on some drugs, but I I feel I feel ready to go. I I can talk. Yeah. Let's go. I'm I'm excited about this actually because I was looking over your episode notes, and I had a couple of wild ideas myself of things that are are not likely. But, yeah. Yeah. I no. I I'm I'm I'm curious because the web, does seem like there's just awesome stuff all the time these days. And I'm excited for what could be. You know? Yeah. Alright. So the first one we have here is better primitives, in the DOM. Right? So what that means is that, like, we have select. You've got, like, radio checkboxes. You've got, …
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“Sentry exemplifies best practices by removing all tracking cookies from their website, requiring consent banners only for embedded content like YouTube videos.”
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