Brian Kardell: Hi, I'm Brian Kardell. I'm a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And I'm Eric Meyer, also a developer advocate at Igalia
Brian Kardell: And, welcome to 2025.
Eric Meyer: Yeah,
Brian Kardell: Right. It's funny, it doesn't feel like 2025.
Eric Meyer: No, but really everything passed about 2006 doesn't feel like
Brian Kardell: True. True. Also, it could have something to do with the fact that it's still 2024 when we're recording this, but maybe in a couple of days when we release this, it will feel really truly like 2025. But you're right, I doubt it.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, maybe everything past 2019, the year that Bladerunner was supposed to be set,
Brian Kardell: Everything after that,
Eric Meyer: Every year after that you're like, this doesn't feel like the weird future.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it's not the weird Future.
Eric Meyer: It feels like a terrible present. Or, maybe not terrible for some of us, hopefully.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, no flying cars yet, but...
Eric Meyer: Sorry, I'm actually really glad we don't have flying cars because I've seen what people do with regular ground cars and I don't want them flying. But anyway, you were about to say.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, so we asked people to think about, just based on a random conversation that Eric and I had, Hey, we think about the past and the past year. We do a lot of talking, reflecting, but looking forward, what kind of things are we looking forward to in the web platform? What kind of things would we like to have happen? So we asked people on the socials to write in with their wishes for 2025 and we got some and we're going to talk about those and maybe what ours are as well.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I mean I don't know if we're going to be able to touch on every single individual person, but a few people said probably because they were answering us, a few people raised something that we often talk about, which is basically a better funding model for the web platform.
Brian Kardell: Several people. Yeah,
Eric Meyer: Eric Portis said that,
Brian Kardell: I don't dunno how to pronounce some of these handles and I don't know their names, but we got one that was, I wish for a well-funded gecko and all Firefox related stuff and well steered Mozilla organizations. That's kind of adjacent.
Eric Meyer: That was from @myfonj.
Brian Kardell: We got experimentation with funding of web feature development, which is I think reflective of our open prioritization and probably also just all the different ways that we're doing that. We're doing it in a lot of ways now where they're starting the Chromium foundation. Igalia does contracting. We're beginning to get some small grants from different places.
Eric Meyer: Certainly there are experiments with funding models, us talking to grant organizations and like you say in some cases getting grants, the Chromium Foundation, if that does move forward in the way that Google has talked about, it could be very interesting as a source of at least semis sustainable funding. But it's going to take a lot and yeah, I think that's something you and I certainly wish for as we do every year. It's possible that with the various legal actions that are happening, not just for Google but also for Apple and who knows who else might get action taken against them, that maybe that will start to create ecosystem incentives to create what we would consider more sustainable funding models. But that again, maybe not, but it is something that I know that you and I both want and that a lot of people want. I and a lot of people maybe wouldn't talk about it that way, but if just five minutes of conversation and you realize, yeah, we're on the same page here, we were just using different words to describe it. Yeah,
Brian Kardell: I think looking through the responses, there seemed to be kind of like a few themes. So one is about funding, like you said. Another one is about networks. Eric Portis actually listed three things, so one of them was networks
Eric Meyer: In the sense of Erin Kisane's talk at XO X. So this past year,
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I assume that's what it is. I haven't watched it, but I did some Googling and I know she talks about networks and things a lot in terms of also moderation and things like that.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, governance questions has actually done a fair bit of research along with Darius Kazim. They did a huge survey, not survey in the sense of check A, B, C, D options, but actually talking to people who run Macon instances for example, and say, how do you moderate? How do you govern? What are your policies? And put out a fairly lengthy report with a lot of details that my understanding is that it was meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive as we would say. It was like, here's how it's being done. But with the goal of allowing people who have to manage networks or some part of networks to look at that and say, okay, what does that mean? What does it mean for what I'm doing? What does it mean for the ecosystem? What are some best practices we could get out of here? Just really a way to have a conversation that is well-informed instead of just shooting the breeze and hypothesizing.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think those things, every time you share ideas, they cross pollinate one another. Maybe you think you have a good idea and then you read where somebody else said, well, we did consider doing X, but then somebody pointed out how it's really kind of messed up and then you read it and you go, oh yeah, maybe we shouldn't do that. I think a lot of ideas in how we should do things are born of good intentions, and I think sometimes in the conversations you find critiques of things that you thought were good ideas or you find new good ideas or yeah, I think it's a really positive thing. So I'm actually really glad that he submitted that one because I personally would really like to see that talk and now it's in my queue to watch it later
Eric Meyer: And someone who, one of the replies we got was from Xavier Góngora (@xg@toplap.org) who said that it would be interesting to see cooperative efforts on frameworks for a quote, their quote, social web unquote, which is maybe not exactly the same, but it's related, right? The sort of idea for, they said things like exploring affordances for both devs end users of well thought out values and guiding principles that design is a big component of how networks function, right? If a network is designed for engagement, then it will essentially elevate certain forms of behavior and if a network is prioritized against engagement, for example, if it's designed to encourage more reflection, then other sorts of behavior will emerge, and that gets at the sorts of things that Erin talks about that she and Darius researched and that other people certainly have talked about that you have to have a clear vision for what you want a network to be and that guides things like the design of prompts, the difference in prompts between what's going on right now and hey, what do you think about life? Those are very, just that difference in prompt, even if everything else about the UI is basically the same, encourage encourages different behaviors and you can certainly go a lot further than that. But yeah, it would interesting to see people take the lessons of the last 15, almost 20 years of social media now and start to really say explicitly what do we want in social networks. To be fair, very complex, difficult questions, ones that I am in no way qualified to even start to answer, but I think they're both interesting and critical conversations to have if we want to sort of keep iterating on social networking.
Brian Kardell: One of the things that's mentioned in that post is spritely and you can find out some stuff on Sprightly Institute on the web. It's an interesting thing there. They're doing a funding drive right now. You can go and donate some money to them, help them reach their goal, but some of the people involved in this are actually co-authors of Activity Pub. So there's Christine Lemer Weber and Jessica Tallon who actually used to be at Igalia and also we do some contracting with them. Andy Wingo does some work for that. It's pretty interesting stuff and check them out and their mission around next generation social networking.
Eric Meyer: On that note, actually I'll throw in reading recommendation for those who like to do that sort of thing. The author, Ruthanna Emrys had a book that came out. It was either early this year or sometime last year or maybe even in 2022 because what is time? But anyway, the book is called A Half Built Garden and it's actually, it's an alien first contact novel where aliens come to earth, but what interests me in relation to this is not necessarily the alien first contact bit, it's the description of how social networks function in this world that Ruthanna Emrys has created, which were very interesting. They're called Dandelion Networks. I'm not going to get into the details.
Brian Kardell: It's very interesting.
Eric Meyer: But yeah, the dandelion networks both do and don't remind me of Mastodon and that the design that you start to understand throughout the book is that you have little sort of local nodes that federate with each other in effect. I don't want to go any further than that because I might forget some of or misrepresent some of the details. And also it's a book worth reading I think even if you're not usually into Aliens Landing on Earth novels, and it's not a word novel by the way. It's not an alien invasion novel. It is an aliens coming to visit novel,
Brian Kardell: Friendly, visit to just stop over, knock on the door, say,
Eric Meyer: Hey, not even. Whether or not they're friendly maybe depends on your viewpoint,
Brian Kardell: Stop by with a nice alien pie.
Eric Meyer: Actually getting together for communal meals is kind of a theme that runs through the book
Brian Kardell: That's great.
Eric Meyer: Anyway, again, A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. There you go.
Brian Kardell: It's funny a little bit earlier I said I think looking through these, there are three themes and I noticed that the first one we had in our pad was by Eric Portis , and then the second one I said, and oh, and Eric also mentioned this one, and funny enough, he also mentioned accessibility, which I think is the third theme.
Eric Meyer: That's Eric for you. He got his finger right on the pulse of what's going on. But yeah, accessibility.
Brian Kardell: So he said, I hope that EU accessibility law does good things for users experience, so not like GDPR. Then our friend of the show, Adrian Roselli, said that articles that assert a thing is accessible because they actually confirmed it with disabled users or at least, if nothing else, fewer articles in posts promulgating bad information,
Eric Meyer: Which fair and that is...
Brian Kardell: Which shocked me, I had no that came out of that field. I don't associate that kind of thing with Adrian at all.
Eric Meyer: Sure.
Brian Kardell: No - he said, 'are either of you seriously surprised that I would say this?'' And we had a little fun with that
Eric Meyer: And yeah, I mean that's been Adrian's wish for years and years, sort of like we have a wish not only for funding models and absolutely agree. There was a somewhat similar thing from Eric Eggert saying, I just want people to learn the simple basics of the web. If he said, if I could never see a clickable but not keyboard accessible div or a button inside a link inside of a button ever again, I would be so happy and yeah, got to agree. That would be really nice if people would just sort of go back to basics a lot more than they do. Although I will say there was that sort of cross pollinated in my mind was something that Olliew (@Olliew@indieweb.social) said, which was all HTML form controls look decent by default and can be styled with CSS, which is actually not on my wishlist, but I have kind of a heretical view on this.
Brian Kardell: So it's tricky what this means exactly. I think we've gone back and forth and repeated a lot of the same things so many times on the show, but if you poll people, and we have actually polled people on this: What do you want the browser to do? How do you want controls to look? Even with saying, should they look the same across all in Chrome? They always look the same or they always look the same on Apple devices on iOS, they always look like iOS controls, like native ones. Even if you ask just that kind of question, you will get literally almost exactly 50 50 answer. People don't agree on this, and so they also won't agree on what is sort of aesthetically pleasing. So we'll get something that's kind of good in all of them, probably good enough - that tries and that won't look the same. But there is currently an effort that began in open UI and has gone through CSS working group and collaborated with what working group, like appearance base it's called, where we will allow you to use the appearance property to set a value called base, which will start everything on a pretty almost exactly normalized, this is what it's going to look like, and that way you can style it as you see fit, but chances are that one will look pretty bland. It's not going to be very opinionated, it's going to be functional. And so it's a difficult thing to balance because you would like it to be out of the box, just you don't have to do anything to it. That would be super, But also you want to be able to customize it and these things are difficult to balance. So I think that the appearance base will be really useful and that we'll probably get, I think what I hope, maybe not for 2025, that might be too soon, but what I hope we get out of this is kind of a nice, what's the right analogy? Like themes. Just themes that people make, beautiful themes that people make that we can share.
Eric Meyer: So this is where I'm going to be a heretic. I personally still think that form control should not be sty form control should look like the native operating system because that's what people are used to. I am not a fan of even coloring scroll bars. It doesn't fit with your theme, sorry. But what's important here is that users recognize a scroll bar for what it is or an input, and I feel like I kind of have a wonder. Twin power fists with Lucas Rum had this wish kind of for page loading indicators. So for single page applications, he wants native page loading indicators. Everyone reinventing loading indicators or the lack thereof is bad. And I'm like, yeah, I would be all completely on board with that. If users could know, oh, that thing means that a page is loading and not wait, why are there little dancing helixes on this page? Where's my content? I mean, yes, most people usually figure it out, but yeah, just people keep reinventing this stuff and it leads to user confusion. And I feel the same way about inputs and scroll bars and that sort of thing. And I know that every designer listening to this is preparing to write a nasty letter to the editor or whatever, and they're throwing tomatoes at the speaker. But yeah, sorry, that's just thinking for years about how would we let people style this stuff. Eventually it came to the point of view of maybe we just shouldn't.
Brian Kardell: Just going back to the thing that you said, it plays into what I was saying too, where you're not out on an island by yourself. I think that there's 49% roughly of people would kind of roughly agree with you on, I think they should look like the operating system. And the reason is always what you said because what people recognize, and this is again, it's a difficult thing to balance because a select doesn't look the same on Android and on iOS and on Windows. They don't look the same.
Eric Meyer: No.
Brian Kardell: So which should it look like? Should it look the same for all web browsers across the operating systems or should it look the same for the operating system? But I think even people like me have nuance. I also just, I don't like styled scroll bars for the most part. I think they put me off, I dunno. It generally doesn't hurt me. I just aesthetically disapprove of them.
Eric Meyer: Yes, you kids.
Brian Kardell: Let's see, what else did people write in navigation? API, stable and cross browser,
Eric Meyer: Right. This is actually on my personal wishlist, even though I almost never do anything with navigation scripting. I mean very occasionally I do, but almost never. But I understand this is sort of just one of those things where we have really terrible half measures that kind of get at some of the things you might want to do with a navigation API, having an actual stable cross-browser navigation API think would be a big, big win, and I would really like to see it.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, part of the reason that I put this one right after the last one is because I feel like conceptually they are a little bit maybe related I way, way back late nineties, we had frame sets and with frame sets you would divide the page up into multiple pieces and clicking in one of them would cause a different one of them to change or could cause itself to change. I mean up in the air. But generally when I think about single page applications, I think about you load a template and that template includes some slots in it that the contents of that may change over time, but it's generally not. Like all areas of the UI change all the time, right?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: If you have your email client, you have your different labels or folders or whatever the analogy that your thing uses and you click on them and it shows you males that are in that, and maybe if you have a split view that's a preview, you click on those and it changes what's in the one to the right or to the bottom, whatever. And I have always thought that we seem to build things in a similar way and that we ought to have something more like an iframe where part of that a built-in part of that would be that it had a native loading indicator, right? Because that's a thing that we had in a way with frame sets. So maybe with view transitions and the navigation API and this new thinking into things, maybe there's room for us to eventually consider something where there would be a nice way to say to semantically indicate to the browser that this is a part of the page that I intend to update. Or maybe even here's a network request that's attached to the update and you go ahead and display a loading indicator there while it's in process. So anyway, I think they're a little bit related, and that is a wish that I have for 2025, and I had for 2024 and 2023 all the way back to at least the early two thousands, I built some frameworks myself that used basically they were custom elements before we had custom elements. And that was for me, I was like, of course, that's one of the things you're going to have that you're going to have this element that's just like an asynchronous block that you can load content into and it just automatically make sure that you know that it's loading some content.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Okay. What else did people write in about?
Eric Meyer: I mean, speaking of loading - some wasms loadable for images, videos and so on, not requiring JavaScript shims. I mean, I guess if you're was, that would be useful. Maybe a default loader spinner would be good in those situations. I think at this point we've sort of moved into the more sort of granular desires. We hit the three themes, but then we have people saying things like, I really want scroll driven animations and anchor positioning to be cross-browser and stable and yeah, absolutely. Some other people I think mentioned view transitions, scroll transitions, those sorts of things. Stuart Langridge I think was one who mentioned that. And yeah, those are pretty cool new things that are coming up. They're not cross browsers yet. Well, in the case of anchor positioning, there's been a fair amount of spec revision, so it's actually appropriate that that's not cross browser yet, but I get that people's wishlist would be, and that's all fixed and then it goes cross browser because everything's been worked out and similar for a lot of other things. I absolutely personally want anchor positioning. I can do side notes, finally cross browser. Once that becomes cross browser Without having to do wacky hacks would absolutely, there would be so many things you could do with anchor positioning and actually view transitions, whether same page or multi-page view transitions combined with anchor positioning could be really amazing. So yeah, it was roit, sorry if I got your name wrong, utility bend.com, who was asking for one of the people asking for scroll driven animations and anchor positioning cross browser. They also wanted a free fun web for everyone, which yeah, we would all love that. And actually one of the ones that Stewart Language mentioned that I really like is font size fit container. So the basic idea being you set the font size so that basically you set font size, fit container or whatever name, but for the container is fine for a diviv. And so each line of text, the font size is changed so that it exactly fills out its line box without needing to mess with word spacing and letter spacing. So you see this sometimes in poster design where you'll have one line of text that has a few words in it, and that will be a much smaller text. And then there's one word that is on its own line, and it is a much larger font size, and that is on purpose. So if I understood what Stuart is asking for, you would have a similar thing there. You could use it on page titles, or I guess you could use it on paragraphs, although maybe there would be a limit to how many lines you could apply it to. Like text wrap balance has a limit to how many lines of text it can be applied to before it gets tossed out the window. It's not a spec limit, it's a performance limit that browsers impose. It's something like if your block of text goes longer than something like six lines in chromium and 10 lines in Firefox, then text wrap balance will become essentially text wrap wrap. It won't balance anymore. My testing WebKit actually may not have a limit. It certainly goes much higher than six or 10 lines. But again, those are browser performance limitations. It's basically the engineer saying, going any further than this, we start to see hits to performance and we don't want to go further. So that might happen with font size fit container
Brian Kardell: To rewind us way back to the wasm loadables for images, the idea there is if you had an image, let's say JPEG Excel for example, and it was supported in one browser, the idea here was you could polyfill that and you could specify a codec, and the codec could be a wasm file. And so maybe if you natively supported it or something or it wouldn't work or I don't know, this is not specified, but the idea is that you could have a codec that was implemented in Wasm And it's kind of interesting. I think that it's related to web codex, not exactly this, but bits of this. And I agree that I would like to see something that gives you that we figure out a capability for extending the web in terms of codex and things like that, where there's a path forward where maybe even browser manufacturers can't agree or that you might have to deliver to an older client or something like that, where you don't necessarily want, we want, I want a pattern, not a just we'll go it alone and figure it out as wasm. I don't think that's probably a good idea. Maybe it should be possible, but it's not. What I'm going for, what I'm going for is sort of a, how do we get past the really hard bits of this that are, can I ship this safely or not? Let's make it easy for me to ship a thing safely when it's just a few outliers here and there and I want to support those people, but also I want to use this new format because it has other advantages. So anyway, I do think that's interesting. That could especially be interesting maybe in specialized applications if you have an application that does image processing and things like that, that's probably really, really helpful. So somebody named Mike Ker wrote in and said, CSS custom media, please. Lots of exclamation point. I agree. This has been on my list for a really long time. I think tab and I started talking about this in 2010 maybe. I know other people have talked about it, and there are two or three different proposals about what this could mean. But I really also would like custom media queries for much the same reason that I would like us to be able to explore that as developers and figure out maybe what are good custom media queries
Eric Meyer: And a custom media query is, what's that?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, so that's what I'm saying. There are a few different proposals and ideas about what that could be is a thing that would've been part of Houdini because the whole effort with Houdini was to explain, not explain to you, but explain in a way that you can plug into the magic that is already CSS, right? CSS already has lots of magic for how do you apply a whole bunch of rules and a rule set with this media query, and then it has a JavaScript API for that. And we have lots of needs where it's very close to that and it'll be really great to say, Hey, this thing is true now, so go ahead and apply all these rules and we do it with other ways, but it seems that you want to match the same pattern basically that you would natively in CSS.
Eric Meyer: Cool.
Brian Kardell: Anyway, I like the idea. I would like to see that one too. I don't know if we'll get it in 2025, but
Eric Meyer: Yeah, and we also had a couple of, I guess, engine requests. One was Ben Delarre (@bendelarre@mastodon.social) wanted Safari to fully release web GPU for all iOS devices, and The Harbinger of Eternal September (@tychi@merveilles.town) wanted Servo to be powering Tauri.
Brian Kardell: That one's interesting because I think Servo is part of Tauri now. When you look at the Servo downloads and really a lot of 'em are from Tauri. So I've not used Tauri. I've listened to some things about it. It seems like if I were to talk about it, I would sound very naive. I think it's basically like Electron, but you can use Servo as the rendering engine, right?
Eric Meyer: We're in favor.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I like it. I would love to find a niche for Servo really, that people think about and get excited about and keep that going into our typical spiel almost at this point about funding. I think we have a couple of projects that I think are important projects that we have helped champion and try to get people excited about and interested about and convince them that these things are worth finding ways to fund together. And I would like to see us achieve some more of that with Vic. I would like to save the wolves. I would like to keep that alive and healthy by finding some real support for sustaining that and also for Servo. I think Servo is a really cool project that honestly, I think because it's already memory safe and parallel, it's really worth people investing in a lot because otherwise we have to continue to do things and migrate these existing engines in that direction. And I don't know, I mean, I think something that's written that way and considered that way from the start is a really valuable thing. So I would really like to see that.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. What else would you like to see? What's on your list that wasn't on our respondent's list?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I don't know. Actually. This is, I think what started the conversation in the first place, I was thinking, I've been, so thinking hard about what we accomplished in 2024 and what things are sort of obvious ones that are on the horizon already, like anchor positioning. I really want anchor positioning and basically the things that are submitted to Interop 2025. A lot of those are things that I want, I guess I can say that I really want, again, to find a way to prioritize Math Mellon, SVG, normalizing them completely into the platform and making them really good quality where everything in CSS works the way it should, where we take those old code paths that were written completely separately and align them so that when we make an improvement over here, it benefits all three of them where possible. There are lots of things around how you do hardware acceleration and things like that that lots of focus into the HTML & CSS stuff and not so much into SVG, for example. I don't know why you would need to hardware accelerate something in math, but who knows? Maybe, right? Maybe. But it shouldn't have to be, require a special investment really, or at least a completely separated investment. Maybe you need to do a little something special for them. But I guess I would like to see things change so that we really are working on one platform that is HTML, SVG and MATHML because they're all integrated. You can include one in the other for all of them. They all work in the browser to a large extent, but they both SVG and MathML are scattered in lots of ways. They both need love that they're not getting from browser vendors despite, I guess you've been there, so you can attest basically almost literal begging. Yep. Anything else? I mean there's the ones that I know that are basically all the ones in interop that we talk about that some of them I'm excited about, anchor positioning, very excited about. View transitions is very cool. There's some stuff like that that's the known stuff, but what are the one or two things that I'm thinking, we didn't get this, we haven't talked about it really, or it's not made progress for a really long time. I'm like, maybe we're almost done with them. That would be great. But I doubt it. I just think that it's like we've been spent so long focused on has and retainer queries being the thing every year. Every year they're a thing. Or for a bunch of people. For a long time it was classes and JavaScript. There's some big things that are like the, I dunno, what's the will we're going to chase? And yeah, I asked what are they? And that led to this conversation. So I don't know, is there a big one that is not one that we've already talked about that you think that you're like, oh boy, if we could just get this,
Eric Meyer: I'm going to go outside CSS and say the Temporal API.
Brian Kardell: Oh, yeah, that could be good!
Eric Meyer: JavaScript.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Again, I almost never do time-based JavaScript programming, but a lot of people have to. And having an actually really good time and date calculating API, which is what temporal is, would be fantastic. It would be, I think a big step forward. And so that's one for me. Totally.
Brian Kardell: Totally.
Eric Meyer: In the CSS world, a lot of it is, I think things we've already talked about have been not, I wish this whole new thing were done. It's more could we get these things that are being worked on over the finish line, so like masonry layout and the work is being done. And there's been the whole debate really between Google and Apple about how it should be specified. My wishlist, one of my wishes for this year would be that those decisions would be made and masonry layout would get basically across the finish line. I did a CSS wishlist a couple of years ago now, and I went back and looked at it, and a lot of things are on that list are either done or almost done. So subgrid basically done has basically done anchor positioning and masonry layout are in
Brian Kardell: Close. They're close,
Eric Meyer: Yeah, they're close. They're getting there. Element transitions, which is view transitions, basically the ones that I would like to see that the ones that aren't necessarily being worked on, hanging, punctuation, cross browser, just the hanging punctuation property. NCSS, which Safari WebKit has supported now for coming up close to a decade. It's been supported there since 2016. And it just, it's a small thing and it seems like it's one of those little things where you think one person could get this done in a week, but they have other priorities, so they can't do that. My white whale, as it were that I've been banging on for many, many years is I really want CSS exclusions. Exclusions are for those not familiar. When you float something like you float an image or a table or whatever, and the other text goes around that area that it defines, that area that float is defining is an exclusion for the rest of the content. And I just want you to be able to define for any element, this creates exclusions for other content, which would let you very easily do something like in CSS grid, put an image that's basically centered on a grid gap and pokes into the two columns next to it. And the content in those columns would flow around each side of the image as if it were sliced in half and floated, which is a way that you can fake this, but I want to be able to say, this element goes here and it creates an exclusion, so other content will avoid it. It doesn't prevent you from overlapping. If you specifically absolutely position two things over each other, that will not necessarily create an exclusion, but you can do a lot with that. And there were proposals, and I think it was Microsoft in Trident did at least some trial implementations of this, but they don't use that engine anymore. So that all went out the window would, this is something that I've wanted for a long time because there are a lot of things that you can fake your way into with a lot of hacking that would become very simple sort of the way that grid made a lot of layout hacks very trivial to do, and requiring no hacks. Exclusions would do very similar things, and it would allow for much less sort of rigidly linear design because even with Grid, yes, you can make things that are less linear than we're used to, but you're still kind of in linear tracks and faking your way out of that is difficult sometimes.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. This was actually, like you say, it was proposed by Microsoft and it worked all the way back in IE 10, so I guess that would be Edge HTML, the new engine that they were writing, and it was implemented, I think along with Grid, you can see some old blog posts about it, and the original editor of the spec was Rossen from Microsoft. And yeah, I mean, it's an interesting idea that we lost along the way. I did think of something that will kind of bookend us nicely back to the funding model, which is, some kind of web monetization. These ideas have been around for a really, really long time, since the very beginnings of the web, even before that. These ideas of some kind of microtransaction or ways to even Patreon and things like that, or ideas like this, ways for us to support that aren't ads effectively. And I don't know that I care so much about my website where I have my blog and stuff. You don't have to support me, that's fine. But I think there are a lot of content creators who, it would be great if we could find ways to support really good content. Newspapers would be nice maybe to not have to subscribe to them, but to have a pass that you buy a news pass and whoever's news I read, that's who gets money at the end of the month. I think there was lots of interesting things we could explore there. And I would say that would be advancing something in there, not even having a solution, but just advancing something in there again, would be high on my 2025 wishlist, because I think ads currently play too much of a role. Okay. So I think that's kind of it, right? We've gone through everybody's things and sort of our own things and Happy 2025.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, let's make it a good year. People.
Brian Kardell
Eric Meyer