Showing posts for Standards
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The web is good now
Chris Coyier's recent talk at CascadiaJS 2022, titled "The Web Is Good Now", makes me feel pretty good about the developer experience—and the user experience that it enables!—of building on the web.
A lot of the mindshare of the modern web is tied to organisations (usually companies) with a vested interest in promoting their tool or library. The hype machine churns powerfully in the web development space, each new announcement generating more buzz than the last: OG Image Generation from Vercel, new docs at React, WebC integrated into Eleventy, which by the way deploys seamlessly on Netlify. None of this is bad—these are all great tools for building better experiences online—but it is exhausting, and it persists this notion that the web is a treadmill: you keep up, or you fall off.
Most of what Chris Coyier covers in his talk, however (with the exception of a plug for Cloudinary, whose service he admits has become overcommoditised), pertains to the web as a platform. New language features in CSS or JavaScript aren't services to opt in to—you've opted into them automatically by working in the browser! They're a rising tide rather than a bigger shinier boat.
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WebDriver
Just learned about a new standardised specification: the WebDriver. The WebDriver specification is a language-agnostic (or more specifically, "language-neutral") interface for libraries that control browsers (or more specifically, "user-agents").
The original specification was created mostly based on the existing interface provided by Selenium, which for a while was synonymous with browser testing—but there are a broad range of libraries in a ton of different languages implementing the WebDriver spec.
The upshot of this is that if you're coming from a background in Python and need to pick up browser testing in Node or Go, you don't need to learn a new API.