I was supposed to be in Plymouth yesterday, giving the opening talk at this year’s Future Sync conference. Obviously, that train journey never happened, but the conference did.
The organisers gave us speakers the option of pre-recording our talks, which I jumped on. It meant that I wouldn’t be reliant on a good internet connection at the crucial moment. It also meant that I was available to provide additional context—mostly in the form of a deluge of hyperlinks—in the chat window that accompanied the livestream.
The whole thing went very smoothly indeed. Here’s the video of my talk. It was The Layers Of The Web, which I’ve only given once before, at Beyond Tellerrand Berlin last November (in the Before Times).
As well as answering questions in the chat room, people were also asking questions in Sli.do. But rather than answering those questions there, I was supposed to respond in a social medium of my choosing. I chose my own website, with copies syndicated to Twitter.
Here are those questions and answers…
The first few questions were about last years’s CERN project, which opens the talk:
Actually, I think the original WWW project got things mostly right. If anything, I’d correct what came later: cookies and JavaScript—those two technologies (which didn’t exist on the web originally) are the source of tracking & surveillance.
The one thing I wish had been done differently is I wish that JavaScript were a same-origin technology from day one:
Next question:
How excited were you when you initially got the call for such an amazing project?
It was an unbelievable privilege! I was so excited the whole time—I still can hardly believe it really happened!
Later in the presentation, I talked about service workers and progressive web apps. I got a technical question about that:
Is there a limit to the amount of local storage a PWA can use?
Great question! Yes, there are limits, but we’re generally talking megabytes here. It varies from browser to browser and depends on the available space on the device.
But files stored using the Cache API are less likely to be deleted than files stored in the browser cache.
More worrying is the announcement from Apple to only store files for a week of browser use:
Finally, there was a question about the over-arching theme of the talk…
Great talk, Jeremy. Do you encounter push-back when using the term “Progressive Enhancement”?
Yes! …And that’s why I never once used the phrase “progressive enhancement” in my talk. 🙂
There’s a lot of misunderstanding of the term. Rather than correct it, I now avoid it:
https://adactio.com/journal/9195
Instead of using the phrase “progressive enhancement”, I now talk about the benefits and effects of the technique: resilience, universality, etc.
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