Deploying web apps today is the portal to madness and pain, with many levels of misery awaiting as you descend into the depths of Hades. Or…if you play it right, it’s little more than the press of a button.

It's time for some acronym soup: SSG SSR CSR SPA MPA…MEAN? SSI?? PERL??? (Officially not an acronym…) If you're coming down with a headache already, trust us, you're not alone. It's…a lot. Thankfully, Ayush and Jared are here to break it all down for you, as well as talk about some of the history behind the many different rendering modes to be found on the web and when you might reach for one or the other…or on so many projects these days, both! Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced...

What if your backend could drive reactive UI changes on your frontend? Without dependencies? Without relying on any particular framework? What if your HTML could gain full-stack programming superpowers? Introducing Action Web Components—inspired by clever Ajax techniques of the past & present and ready to march boldly into the future. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future Links & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on MastodonThe Spicy Web & That HTML Bl...

How did the Internet first begin? Why was it developed at the Advanced Research Projects Agency? Where was it initially launched at the end of the 1960s? Is it pronounced r-OO-ter or r-OW-ter?? These and other hard-hitting questions are answered as Jared & Ayush take a deep dive into the birth of humanity’s global computer network…with a dash of 90s nostalgia thrown in for good measure. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future Links & Show Notes: Follow Jus...

It’s been a wild, wild ride getting from the anything goes origin story of the mainstream web—anyone still remember “Netscape Navigator” and “Trumpet Winsock”?—to today’s carefully-curated experience in the age of Interop and using GitHub to achieve spec consensus. But the relative calm we enjoy today when it comes to progress and feature parity across browser engines perhaps doesn’t quite tell the whole story…there are still threats to an open web which works well for all, protects our priv...

Whoa, there was one more “State of” survey from 2023 to mine for content! Who knew? Yes, the results are in, and we talk about them…but more broadly, our feelings about the state of web frameworks in our industry and the much-ballyhooed pendulum swing back to server-side rendering and HTML-first techniques (though the rate of change is perhaps not what we might wish for). Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future Links & Show Notes: Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon...

What if you could take HTML & CSS, package them up in a file, and publish that file as a singular artifact? That's essentially what ePub is. (ePUB? EPUB?) With Ayush's real-world experience publishing e-books, we are guided through understanding more about this important (and sometimes overlooked) spec. Alas, the devil's in the details, and we get into many of those details here on today's episode of Just a Spec. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future Links &...

When you've spent a good portion of your career as a web developer utilizing CSS processors & frameworks, what would lead you to embrace vanilla techniques and modern CSS features? This is the question in the air as we welcome our first ever guest to the show, Elise Shaffer. Elise walks us through her journey learning full-stack development via frameworks like Rails and Tailwind, and then more recently enjoying the freedom and simplicity of web platform features on the frontend. It's a ce...

The results of the State of HTML 2023 survey are in! It’s an exciting time for HTML which has seen a lot of growth and expansion of capability in a welcome break with the past (when typically CSS and especially JavaScript would leapfrog the rate of change of the Web’s foundational markup language). Still, some might say we need a lot more progress on this front, which is why these survey results—while exhibiting some pressing issues around diversity and broad industry awareness—offer vital in...

Where data lives, how to retrieve data, how to change data, how to track updates to data and provide feedback accordingly to the user…in other words, state. Web application development can necessitate a wide range of possible options for how you manage state, and in this episode we look at many of the ways this may work from the server to the client and back again. You may be surprised at some of the “old-school” techniques we end up cheering on in our conversation. Also…how the blazes do you...

Join us for a meaty conversation all about the various levels of specifications and conventions which make the World-Wide Web go: from TCP/IP to HTTP to WebSockets and beyond. We also talk about conventions in various languages and frameworks to enable building web applications servers in a straightforward and portable manner, as well as building a personal knowledge base wiki out of Markdown files and an SSG (Static-Site Generator). Let’s fly! Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced ...

Oh yes, we’re back! In this first Just a Spec episode of the year, the lads speculate on the grand conspiracy behind the results publication delay of State of HTML 2023 (not really!), catch up on personal news from during the podcast’s year-end hiatus, and run through a very entertaining list of all the goodies being worked on by browser vendors as part of Interop 2024. And is the complexity of the web platform just too damn high? (At least for anyone wanting to author a new browser engine?) ...

Thanksgiving’s coming up here in the U.S. and we thought it’d be fun to talk about of our favorite aspects of the modern web (and how it compares to the “dark days” of old). In addition, Jared’s launched a brand-new course platform over at The Spicy Web with the first offering being a deep-dive into crafting vanilla CSS architectures and formulating design systems. We talk about that and a bunch of the technical details of the underlying DIY platform. Enjoy this special edition of Just a Spec...

Ah yes, that notorious hard problem in computer science. Time to name some things as we talk abut the philosophy undergirding software development, why “naming things” is hard but also a core aspect of the job, the sometimes reluctance to name things in as disciplined a fashion on the frontend as on the backend, how to communicate across teams and stakeholders via Ubiquitous Language, the importance of embracing modern HTML & CSS semantics when naming things, and so much more. Hosted by ...

A whole grab bag of topics today! We talk about some of the well-known storage APIs like localStorage and sessionStorage, as well as the newer IndexedDB API which pairs well with Service Workers. We also talk about the three Observer APIs to help with reacting to DOM mutations, scrolling, and size changes. Apparently fetch DID happen (!), and testing against three headless browsers at once in a fast and reliable manner is easier than ever. All that and more in today’s episode of Just a Spec. ...

The results of the 2023 State of CSS survey are in, and we're here to break it all down and uncover the most interesting nuggets and opportunities as we look ahead to the future of CSS and the web platform. But not before some spicy meta chat on open source governance and how frequent contributors are treated in light of the recent Hotwire Turbo / TypeScript debacle. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links: That HTML Blog (Jared)Radioactive Toy (Ayush)Turbo:Remove DHH for CoC Violations - I...

The lads are back with an action-packed episode full of juicy details about “buildless” architecture & “Turbo” architecture, server components, tools & techniques which encourage server-rendered HTML pages and fragments sent over the wire, making websites which work without JavaScript, the huge pendulum shift we see in the industry back to coupled fullstack DX, and so much more. Grab your notepad because there’s a lot of ground to cover! Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links: That...

Gather ’round the accessibility tree, dear listeners, and hear a grand tale about roles and attributes, screen readers and DOM inspectors, and how to be a good A11Y. We also touch on why accessibility isn’t something you bolt on after you design a website but is part of the process from the very beginning. Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links: Want to keep the discussion going?Join the The Spicy Web Discord ServerFollow @justaspec@intuitivefuture.com on MastodonHTML Design Principles: Pr...

We're here to deep dive into the technical underpinnings of everyone's FAVORITE internet technology: email. ;-P Amaze your nerd friends with all the exciting trivia you will learn in this action-packed episode! Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links: From Ayush:ScattergunThe Rails and Hotwire CodexScary weather 😟 Rhodes wildfires - Andy BellHistory of email - WikipediaCompuServe - WikipediaThe Unknown Story of How Hotmail Grew to 12 Million Users in 1.5 YearsDo all email clients use "In-R...

It’s hard to imagine in this current world of any dot-something you could possibly imagine when looking to register a domain name, but there was once a past era of the internet when all we had was .com, .net, and .org. A dark time. A sad time. How did we get there in the first place? And how did we eventually arrive here at today’s promised land? Join us for this rousing episode all about: gTLDs! (and IANA, and ICANN, and IETF, and…) Hosted by Jared White & Ayush Links ICANN Archives: T...