Just a Spec

Oct 02 2024 25 ep. 50 mins 9

Just a Spec Podcast artwork

A podcast about the protocols, the projects, and the people who make the open platform of the Internet possible.

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Deploying Your Web App…What Could Go Wrong?

Oct 02 2024 53 mins

Congratulations! You’ve got yourself a nice little World-Wide Web site. Now it’s time to deploy it for everyone to enjoy through their World-Wide Web browser. Easy, right? WRONG! 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

Your Static Just Zapped Me

Sep 11 2024 46 mins

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 mi

Action Web Components for Full-Stack Magic

Aug 28 2024 45 mins

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 pro

And Lo, There Was ARPANET (Baby Internet!)

Aug 15 2024 39 mins

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

The Browser Wars & an Uneasy Peace

Jul 24 2024 49 mins

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 engin

Pendulum Swings & 2023’s State of JS

Jul 10 2024 41 mins

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). Hos

How Many Books Could ePub Pub if ePub Could Pub Books

Jun 26 2024 35 mins

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 her

From Frameworks to Using the Platform with Elise Shaffer

Jun 12 2024 48 mins

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 Tailwin

HTML Finally Gets the Respect It Deserves

May 29 2024 44 mins

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 th

This State of Affairs

May 15 2024 77 mins

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 sur