Brian Kardell: Okay. Hi, I am Brian Kardell. I am a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And I'm Eric Meyer, also a developer advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: And we just got back from the W3C's big annual TPAC event that brings together, I don't know, I would say maybe 500 people were there.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it feels about right. It was at least a few hundred.
Brian Kardell: Heard an estimate that was close to 500.
Eric Meyer: Okay.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, so lots of working group meetings and things, and we thought we would do a show two, discuss what that was like and what happened and what we've been doing the past week.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I mean, from my perspective anyway, one of the important things about TPAC is it brings all of the working groups together. So each working group of the W3C, such as the CSS working group or the web accessibility working group or whatever, working groups, they meet on their own schedule remotely virtually most of the year. And then some working groups will have a few in-person meetings, but every working group effectively has an in-person meeting at TPAC. And it's a time where those working groups can actually have joint meetings. So I'll talk about CSS because that's the working group I spend the most time in, but the first couple of days were almost back to back joint meetings between CSS and working group and whatever else, their working group. So there was a joint meeting between the CSS and accessibility working groups. Actually a couple of different accessibility related working groups where things were discussed like, okay, we're talking about doing this in CSS. What are the accessibility problems? Or the accessibility folks saying, Hey, this is an accessibility problem. This presentation is an accessibility problem. How can that be addressed? But it could be the accessibility working group probably cross met with the spatial computing working group and CSS and spatial computing could get together or whoever. And those I think are really valuable because yes, you can do that sort of thing online, and that does happen in fact, but having everyone in the same place, literally in the same room and being able to sort of interact in that way, I think is really valuable.
Brian Kardell: Then there is, on Wednesday, every year there is breakouts day, which is a little bit more freeform. People suggest topics, and it's the name of this that, the word I know is barcamp style, but there's another one. Maybe people don't know that one.
Eric Meyer: I think it's just unconference.
Brian Kardell: Its an unconference. So people suggest different topics and then they align. They find out which ones have support, which ones have interest, and then they kind of try to arrange them on a schedule where people can attend different ones. And so those actually, everybody loves those. I, I think everybody's favorite day of TPAC. There's so much valuable stuff that happens there, and I kind of wonder if two days of breakouts would be even better because what happened this year is there was 13 separate tracks and there's too many things that are,
Eric Meyer: Yeah, actually I just counted, it was 14. There was 14 parallel tracks, and almost every track had something in it. And when we say tracks, there were 13 or 14 concurrent breakout sessions happening. So yeah, I mean, that's not unreasonable to say. Maybe if we only had seven tracks per day and we did those across two days, but even that would be crazy. And we should say these again, these are breakout sessions that were proposed by people coming to TPAC and they could be, there are things like web documentation, discussing how to handle web feature deprecation. I mean, I'm looking at the schedule right now, and there are things like mitigate threats for the digital credentials, API that was a one hour breakout session cookie layering the digital wallet project in Taiwan. So sort of a case study of here's how we did this harmonizing identity related web platform, APIs, next actions for digital manga and comics.
Brian Kardell: That was an interesting one. I didn't get to do. That was a big thing in 2018 or 19 was one of those W3C did a whole thing with the manga, like digital. It was very cool actually. So I wanted to follow up and see, but I didn't get to go to that one because there are 14 competing tracks and
Eric Meyer: Exactly,
Brian Kardell: There were at least three that I wanted to be in any given point in time.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, there were ones. There was one called Let's actually fix web notifications, was competing with web on the moon.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, that also seemed really interesting. I mean, it's kind of out there, but.. I wanted to go to that one, but it was like you said, it was up against something else.
Eric Meyer: I'm trying to scan, oh, there was a one year update on partitioning the visited links. History was one that I went to, and that was actually very interesting and got pretty deep into the technical weeds of what Chrome does and what they would like to do and how that might impact future technologies. I couldn't even follow some of it because it was deep enough in the weeds. It was like, here are the various modules and how they relate, and here's a great big flow chart of what happens inside the engine. And I was lost at that point, but it was still interesting. There are just so many more.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, an interesting thing that I bet a lot of people don't know is we think about W3C and what wig or what wg, however you prefer to say it. I think a lot of people think about them as completely disjoint, but the people who are work in what WG also are involved in W3C and they came from, originally it came out of W3C and they always have used W3C stuff like meetings and connections and things like that. So they all attend TPAC and there is come meet with what wg internationalization people, accessibility people, security people, privacy people, people who have things about web components, people who have things about CSS open ui. So there's a lot of interesting things happening there because a lot of the things that I'm interested in that I talk about ultimately touch HML or the DOM somehow. Yeah. So I thought those were pretty interesting meetings. And as far as the breakouts go, there were some that I went to that there were a lot that were web components themed. There's a lot of open web components issues. One that I was really excited to see make good progress is the cross root aria stuff. I think we're going to work on that this year, excited to solve that because it's really difficult that we have this boundary where IDs from the outside don't make sense on the inside. This is a recurring theme that you'll see, and there's a bunch of issues in CSS that are like this too. So you create a name in CSS for an animation. Where's that name? Relevant?
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Yeah. I actually just found the list of the different tracks. There was feature lifecycle, permissions, identity, those were separate ux, real-time, web ai, web components, wallets standards, and web apps were sort of the quote tracks, but a whole bunch of the breakout sessions were not classified in specific tracks, so they were just, this is interesting. It doesn't fit into one of these categories, but we're going to put it on the schedule anyway. And we've marked certain ones. All the AI related things were marked with little robot symbols. So en generative AI risks was followed by web API for hybrid ai, and then there was a demonstration of AI powered accessibility auditing, things like that. But then there was literally just a web components category, as I say, track unquote. So sharing styles with declarative shadow dom, scoped custom element registry web components, and aria. Those were some of the sessions from that particular track. So yeah, it was really cool and really overwhelming and really exhausting, I have to say... Because There are breaks between, but you just boom, boom, boom. And then there was always that, well, basically what I told people when people said, Hey, what are you going to do on Wednesday? I said, well, I'm not sure right now because I went through and subscribed to all of the sessions that sounded like really interesting, not just vaguely interesting, but really interesting. And my Wednesday calendar looks like a game of Tetris that I am about to lose.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, exactly.
Eric Meyer: There were just so many things next to each other and eventually you have to pick. But yeah, it would be nice to have a little bit less of a tyranny of choice there in some way. But then it's difficult because you have five days, and the CSS working group did a full two days of just the CSS working group and almost two full days before Wednesday of the joint meetings. And is maybe the answer if we did two breakout days is only do joint meetings and don't really do a meeting of your own, but that then cuts down on the number of face-to-face meetings that some working groups can do. Yeah, it's a real challenge because,
Brian Kardell: Yeah, so there is actually one that I missed that I really, really wanted to attend, which is, so seven years ago, I just looked this up seven years ago, I did this whole series on web speech and I was fascinated by web speech because it is one of the sort of lost things. It's like because of when it was created and how it came about, it's like it's not actually a W3C rec track thing, but it has wide implementation, but the wide implementations are kind of in the state of the dom when jQuery was around where it's like you definitely need something to paper over the inconsistencies and also the API is not good. It lacks a lot of features. And so I wrote these articles and then I opened a thing for tag review hoping to get it started, and then it went into some W3C process thing. And for years there would be like, Hey, let's talk about it briefly and then just kind of nothing. And there was one about improvements to web speech, and it was driven by Google, and I was like, I definitely have to go to that. And then I couldn't. And the reason I couldn't is because Rob Flack from Google was giving his breakout on the carousels patterns, and people probably don't, as you might remember, the spicy sections experiments that we did, we kind of backed off on that because of some feedback that we got because we are looking for patterns to resolve the feedback that we got, and it looked like this might be the way. And so we've kind of given Rob some feedback along the way, and in his presentation there was a lot of discussion about using this for tabs and got some interesting and mostly positive feedback. So I'm really hoping that develops.
Eric Meyer: Was that the one about doing carousels via CSS or was it a different one? There were a couple of them, I think.
Eric Meyer: Okay, let's get in. Yeah, let's get into, well, we saw, and what was interesting, so this was a talk, sorry, a breakout, which I guess is sort of a talk depending on how it's structured, but this was Rob from Google saying, here's a proposal for ways to use, basically, sorry, here's a proposal for things to add to CSS to make carousels possible. Is that sort of what it was or,
Brian Kardell: Yes.
Eric Meyer: Okay, cool. And you feel like it's going in a good direction, or at least it's in vaguely the right direction or?
Brian Kardell: Well, yes is the short answer to that.
Eric Meyer: Okay.
Brian Kardell: I think that it's difficult because when we begin talking about this, everybody, including myself wants to say carousels are not good. They're not good, and yet they exist and it's foolish of us to just say, don't do that. I have this reaction a lot. I had this reaction, CS working group introduced the ability to reorder content without saying how that should work for accessibility. And then they were just like, here's the best feature ever, but don't use it.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I think we've learned over the years is that if you decide that a thing people are doing shouldn't be done, and so you don't create a standard way to do it because it shouldn't be done, then everyone goes off and comes up with their own way to do it. And many of them are much worse. This actual solutions are much worse than if you had just put it in JavaScript or put it in CSS or whatever, or HTML for that matter. You end up with really terrible, incredibly heavy only works on the latest browser kind of solutions instead of, well, if we had done this at the time then five years ago, then it would be very widely supported and it could be performant and et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, with carousels, I think there's likely to be that discussion if these proposals move forward to add carousel capabilities to CSS, there's going to be probably a discussion with some pushback. Don't add this crap to CSS. Nobody should ever do carousels. And yeah, I think the counter, not the counter, the response to that is, but if we don't do this, people will just keep doing carousels even worse. Right?
Brian Kardell: Yeah,
Eric Meyer: Absolutely. And so we should standardize this because if it's in CSS, then it's much more easily disposable to accessibility features, the accessibility tree, that sort of thing.
Brian Kardell: And also there's an aspect of this that is like, what is it? What is it and how does it work? So most of this is built on scrolling and scroll snap and new primitives for almost paging through content.
Eric Meyer: And then how does that work making it easy to make that accessible.
Brian Kardell: So I think a lot of it has to do with thinking about how you break it down. Should this be a new element or what is it? And the things that I wrote about when we started the spicy sections is that for a lot of content, should it be a carousel? Okay, no is the answer probably. But if you're just a designer and you like a carousel, should it be a carousel? My answer is probably, maybe it depends. What does the screen size look like? How much available space do I have? Maybe sometimes I want to squeeze it into a carousel because it's like this is a lot of information and if you're on a mobile device, maybe it's super easy to thumb through it and you can just scroll past it really easily. Whereas on a desktop, maybe I want to put it in a grid or something like that. So thinking about it that allows you to say, well, it's like a primitive scroll, and we don't have a scroll element in the web. That's a thing that's about design. There's a design affordance that we allow you to apply. And so that's where the analogy comes in here that I think is pretty useful.
Eric Meyer: And I will say mobile is where I don't hate carousels. We don't think of them as carousels probably, but like you said, yeah, on mobile, if I'm thumbing through a page and I come to a section that it somehow tells me, Hey, you can swipe sideways here to see different things, I'm okay with that works. But then on desktop generally, no thank you. I would much rather have them as a grid. So having all of this in let's CSS is what this was about is probably on balance a win because like I say, then things are more addressable from the accessibility side. If they're formally represented, like the CSS object model can communicate back and forth with the accessibility model and all that sort of thing. Yeah. So I thought one of the interesting sessions that I saw, the visited links one, the one year report that I mentioned before that was interesting and I hope that I can track down a copy of a recording of it or some slides or whatever. But another one that I really was interested in was a discussion about the HTML model element. So this is a proposed element for HTML that would be used to refer to a 3D model or a 3D scene depending on what kind of terminology you want, but just sort of the way that we have video and audio elements that can refer to video or audio. This would refer to a 3D model, and it could be a simple 3D model or it could be a much more complicated 3D model. One of the things that got discussed as part of this breakout was whether or not was the appropriate structure. If you have a 3D model that involves animations and loops, Is it sufficient to just have a model element or would you need more elements? Do you want to represent that sort of thing as elements? And also for that matter, how do you manage partial content? Because 3D scenes can become very, very large in terms of the number of bites that have to be transferred because the geometry is fairly simple, but most 3D scenes have a whole lot of texturing, and the texturing is usually raster images. And even if it's not raster images, it's probably very complicated SVG images or it could be videos. There could be videos embedded in this scene or projected on walls or whatever. And you could easily, I think the number they were saying was that these 3D models can easily be a hundred megabytes, which is enormous. Nobody would ever,
Brian Kardell: It's almost the size of a webpage.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, really, I wouldn't even put a hundred megabyte video onto a webpage. And the way YouTube gets away with it is that they send little chunks. Each video is effectively chopped up into a bunch of these little chunks, and those are sent to you one at a time, or maybe in parallel if you have a sufficiently capable browser that supports that sort of thing in HTT P. But the point being they're not just sending you 100 megabyte movie file. And so there were questions about how do we manage that in 3D scenes? And it got into discussions like level of detail, which is a rendering technique that 3D modelers already use. And so there were questions like, okay, if a model has levels of detail, do we specify such that the lowest level of detail models are sent first and the scene starts to render and it might be all chunky, and then as the higher level of detail models come in, they get dynamically replaced. Is that acceptable?
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I think that's the thing on video as well, right? The adaptive pit rate thing you see in even television, if you are watching television, it's all digital these days, and sometimes you can see it get a little bit blocky, but it tries to keep up so that you can get everything. So you might have a super HD and you're getting regular HD or even the lowest kind of,
Eric Meyer: Or even yeah, SD Because they're trying to have it be a continuous experience rather than showing you 4K and then stopping for 30 seconds, the little spinner goes, right, exactly. Which if you hit that in streaming, you're like, okay, I don't have any bit. Right? And I see it on YouTube too. You're watching a video and it starts out in 10 80 p or whatever, and then for whatever reason, suddenly it's in 1 44 and everything's super blocky. And if it's just something you're playing in the background or it's your second screen or sort of background noise, maybe you don't care. But if you're trying to watch something technical, it has lots of details, you might be like, oh God, now I have to figure out what to do if I just pause it. It's the chunk that it sent me and possibly the next several chunks are all in 1 44, and I already have those locally, it's not going to send those to me again. So do I reload the whole thing Anyway. Yeah. So these are the kinds of things that get discussed. And again, one of the advantages of having everyone in one place and having either these joint sessions or these breakout sessions is someone can say, okay, I'm going to talk for 45 minutes about the model element, or more precisely, we are going to talk for 45 minutes about the model element. Whoever's suggested it might have a quick presentation of here's where we stand right now with this proposal comments. And you could have, there's somebody from privacy and there's somebody from the performance community and a web component expert and just people are able to say, okay, have you considered that 3D models could be used for fingerprinting in the following ways, Or I'm really concerned about a hundred megabyte models and their impact on web performance, both for the user and just in general. We're already in some ways struggling to keep up with video streaming. What are we going to do about model streaming? And then someone like me could say, is there a way that I could use CSS to change the color of anything in the model? I didn't say that because they're not at that point, but maybe somebody's really interested in being able to say that the background color of a 3D model should be in their corporate primary color instead of whatever the normal skybox is. And you're like, well, CSS has backgrounds. That's a background.
Brian Kardell: I mean, I think that when you have meetings like this, you have all this cross. That's the whole idea of it. You have all this cross idea things that start to come together. I think I also wanted to go to that, but I didn't because there was something else that I went to instead. I don't know which one it was, but I saw in the minutes that one of the questions there was, well, those things that you were talking about, they sound in some ways really similar to audio and video, and those are media elements. And that means in the S spec and from A IDL standpoint, the parts you can touch with JavaScript, they have certain similarities, and should it be a media outlet, it
Eric Meyer: Should it be a new kind of media.
Brian Kardell: Then, so you get people in there from what way who are thinking about that. And then maybe you get somebody in there from CSS like you who makes that comment. Then maybe you get somebody from web components who says, oh, well yeah, I can appreciate how this is complicated. But in web components you can expose parts and then those parts you can have limited styling on, and maybe that's a way that you could say in this 3D model, the background is exposed like this with this pseudo class, it exports these parts, and then you cannot have full control over the styling, but whoever makes the model expose parts. So maybe they expose a part that's hair and a part that's skin and eyes and whatever, and you can set their backgrounds and their foregrounds and it could be interesting, but those kind of ideas smashed together in person much more rapidly. And also I would say get short circuited much more rapidly if they're a non-starter rather than somebody thinking about that a whole lot and then going off and writing a blog and doing a whole bunch of work and then somebody to point out the obvious rub that you're not thinking of.
Eric Meyer: It Was helpful sometimes. Yeah, and speaking of parts wasn't one of the things you went to about DOM parts?
Brian Kardell: I did not actually attend that. I was very interested in it. I have been interested in it for a long time. If you don't know this is, a lot of people say, well, why doesn't the dom have a templating kind of thing to begin with? The fact that you can't is why we have so many other solutions. You have to have handlebars, you have to have, they used to be mustache. I'm dating myself with the ones I'm using here, but Angular, react, JS, X, all of these lit have some kind of templating in them. A lot of people then try to make slots be that, but slots aren't really that. Yeah. So this is aiming to be an answer, but it's more aiming to be a primitive that could be used by all those other ones. Probably not one that you'll just use exactly, directly. I don't know. It's very complicated and both Apple and Google are interested in it and it makes slow progress, but it's probably 10 or 12 years into it and we're not there. And there was something else that was going on at the same time, or maybe I was just in a really interesting conversation and couldn't go. I did want to mention one of the most important things I think about TPAC is that you meet real human beings who are really interested and concerned about the web and probably in capacities that are totally new to you, and you find out that, oh, there's these people and these people really could use your help. Actually, here's this really important thing that you've just totally never considered. And a lot of times I think it's also us bringing it in the other direction where it's us explaining to a lot of people why it's really important to increase the sponsorship outside of Apple and Google. I also give you a little bit of inside baseball about the breakdown of this. So we said that there was 500 and whatever, 120 of those I think were from Google.
Eric Meyer: Yikes.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: I did not realize there were that many.
Brian Kardell: There were over a hundred from Google and I don't know from Apple, I would guess more like 20, something like that. I don't know how many from Mozilla, I would have to guess. It's probably also in the same kind of ballpark as
Eric Meyer: Apple, you mean?
Brian Kardell: Yeah. And we sent seven, I think.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, six or seven.
Brian Kardell: And many organizations send one person. Many organizations send one or two people, and they are there for a very specific reason, but you meet a lot of people and help make connections. Sometimes you can say, oh, you should talk to X, Y, Z, and you can help connect people on things. I think that is actually very, very important. Egal sponsors TPAC every year since, I don't know, 20
Eric Meyer: A long time ago,
Brian Kardell: 2017, I think something like that,
Eric Meyer: Which is now a long time ago.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, so I think the only ones that have done that consistently for a really long time. And so W3C has a new CEO, Seth Dobbs, and also a new CDO Chief Development Officer. Sylvia Cadena, I'm probably pronouncing her name wrong, unfortunately.
Eric Meyer: Thanks. No, Sylvia Cadena sounds about right.
Brian Kardell: And because of our sponsorship, they asked to meet with me and we had a nice hour long meeting about the future of W3C and what we think W3C should do and what Igalia does, and that was really nice.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, that's really cool.
Brian Kardell: So we also got to help hook up Open Web Docs with Sylvia because she was talking about, she has a long history of fundraising and things like that, and we were saying, look, the way that all this stuff is funded is look around at what's going on here. I mean, overwhelmingly Google and I mean, I don't want to talk Google out of sending a hundred people. I think it's great that they send a hundred people, you know what I mean? Somebody has to fund this stuff and they're funding it and whatever the flaws in that, I'm glad that they're funding it, but we need a strategy for when things don't go, and here's what happened with MDN, and here's how we got Open Web Docs, and I really like to introduce you if it's okay. And so hopefully that pans out and that can be a good introduction.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Thank you. I mean, as somebody who's involved in Open Web Docs, I'm a steering committee and governing committee member thanks to a Igalia's support of Open Web Docs. Yeah, funding has been a concern. It is for everybody because turns out you'd need money to operate in our current economic setup. It's a thing. It's strange. True. I know. Is one of the things that I really got out of TPAC, and this was my first, by the way, this was my first TPAC. A lot of people didn't believe that.
Brian Kardell: I had a hard time believing that myself. A number of people were like, how can that be?
Eric Meyer: Possible? Right? And I actually got into a couple of conversations where people said, yeah, I think I met you a couple years ago when you did that talk at TPAC. I was like, I'm glad that it hadn't made an impression on you because
Brian Kardell: I wasn't
Eric Meyer: Here.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, right. That's right. That's right. You did. Like a keynote thing, right? You did a thing about funding.
Eric Meyer: Yes, I did do a talk.
Brian Kardell: We're going to link that and people should watch it because this is a really good talk.
Eric Meyer: Actually it, but yeah, I did a talk that it was a couple years ago now, I dunno, whatever that I recorded and it was played at TPAC, but I was not physically there because for various reasons you can't always go. So yeah, people just, they were like, yeah, you were standing in a train station. And I was like, okay, clearly you saw the talk and you have now remembered that I was there, but I in fact was not. But anyway, the point being that was kind of a rabbit hole sidebar to the idea that what I really got out of it being my first epac was in a lot of cases I met people in meat space for the first time. I started calling it, this is our first meat meet. People that I have been working with online for years, or in some cases probably measurable in decades, more than half of Open Web Docs. I was meeting in person for the first time of the four who were there. Estelle is the only one that I had ever met in person before. Estelle Weyl, who's one, he was a co-author on my book, but we had only met a couple of times before in person, so we got to hang out and I got to meet Florian Schultz and Will Bramberg and Vinyl in person and hang out with them for a little bit. And then Kadir, who's one of the Web DX community group, not chairs exactly, but he's kind of an organizer, met him in person for the first time, and you and I had a really good conversation with him and Pete LaPage, who I hadn't seen in years about baseline and about DX and about BCD watch, and
Brian Kardell: We should probably mention that
Eric Meyer: Related stuff. That was, I thought it was really interesting, and it was nice to be able to just have that conversation. We were sitting on one of the tables on the terrace where the breaks and the lunches were just talking about this stuff that interested us all and that we all want to see push forward and there. Yeah, it's sort of the hallway track is what people who go to sort of more traditional conferences call it. And it's the same kind of thing here. I mean, maybe a terrace track, but
Brian Kardell: Yeah, the most valuable thing, the most valuable thing actually is that I think it's, you can call it the hallway track or also there's the dinner and drinks track where things there are just even whatever, they just come up and you have an opportunity to talk to people. Sometimes it's even people that you weren't even expecting to be in the conversation and really good stuff, really good stuff happens.
Eric Meyer: You might spot someone who you've been meaning to talk to and go over, they're talking with a few other people and you're like, Hey, it's good to see you. And you're like, Hey, have you met so-and-so, and this person and that person, maybe some of them you have and some of them you haven't, and what are you all talking about? And it turns out to be something that you hadn't even been thinking about, but suddenly it's super interesting because you're talking with people who are super passionate about 3D modeling or digital identity or micropayments on the web, and you just start absorbing. And maybe if you're lucky, it's something that a little bit about and you could give something back to. And yeah, I mean I think that's always any conference, any gathering, the hallway track is really almost always the most valuable. So what else did we see we're coming to the end, but anything else
Brian Kardell: We had the hackathon
Eric Meyer: Oh
Brian Kardell: Yeah, there was a hackathon. It usually happens at these is that there is a developer meetup, but these are things that are organized independently usually. So this year there was no developer meetup, and part of the reason I think there was no developer meetup is this one was really packed because this was, I can't believe we're only bringing this up now, but this is the 30th anniversary of the W3C. And so there was a lot around that on Wednesday, I think in the evening
Eric Meyer: It was on Wednesday, there was a gala or gala, whatever, which sounds way than it actually was, although some people did dress up very, very spiffy, but not everyone. Not everyone, but it
Brian Kardell: Was nice. So I think it was really packed, and that's why we didn't have a developer meetup this time. And Elina Lappe, who is from HoloPin is kind of an interesting company that does digital badging, not to swipe you in and out, but the old Mozilla badging thing like that where you can create these certifications I guess is a use case where you can say, Hey, this person completed this, and you have this collection of digital verifiable things. It's an interesting idea. I remember tracking it when Mozilla was doing it years and years ago, like 2012. And so somebody built a company on that idea, and it's kind of interesting, but she put together this hackathon and it was just people from TPAC and she organized some money for some prizes and pizza and soda. It was nice. I wasn't going to go to it. I didn't register for it or anything, but then I showed up late and decided to do it. Actually, I showed up late and I handed in a kind of joke, I wrote a thing with Charles McCarthy Neville on, we wrote it on paper and it was just a joke and we handed it in, but then she took it seriously and was trying to upload it to the GitHub. So I thought, well, I better do a real thing. So yeah, it was short, but I used the time, the assignment for the thing was to create a tutorial, something to educate. And given that I was short on time, I thought, well, I wonder if there's something that I know that a lot of people in this room probably don't know. Maybe I can at least do something that's educational, so is interesting to them, but also helps promote a thing that I'm interested in to get more eyeballs on it. And so I just pointed people to, I mean, it's very super brief. I pointed people to the GitHub for the heading Offset that we talked about with Keith's circle on a couple of shows ago. There's a polyfill for that and made people aware of the purpose that it's literally the oldest problem on the web and that it's kind of making progress and here's how it works. It's very, very simple. And I didn't expect to win anything, but somehow I did. So that was cool. Yeah, maybe I won because it was interesting. It wasn't fancy. It was not fancy. I mean, it looked like Tim original webpage. It was very, very basic. But I think it was interesting. I won some Legos that I gave away.
Eric Meyer: Wow. Which one did you win? I forget.
Brian Kardell: It was like third place. It was like a space Lego thing. I don't do Legos and I don't have room to bring them back on my, yeah, it's kind of a problem with that sort of thing. Gift cards are very portable. Maybe next time gift cards would be a better,
Eric Meyer: There you go. Yeah, I know they were all space themed Lego, but I couldn't remember which set you would want. But
Brian Kardell: There were some good entries though. Yours and Estelle's was very clever. Very clever. I voted for yours in Estelle. It was very clever.
Eric Meyer: Well, we voted for yours, or at least I did.
Brian Kardell: Do you want to say what yours was or do you want me to explain?
Eric Meyer: Yeah, so Estelle and I did a five star rating widget, which Estelle had actually created, to be honest, but it worked without JavaScript, and it was specifically set up so that you couldn't submit unless you gave a five star rating because that's what our project deserved.
Brian Kardell: That was great.
Eric Meyer: It used adjacent sibling and the control state, pseudo classes invalid and valid and checked in combination. There was also has, which we didn't even try to Alize, but it was in there and because the idea was write a tutorial. And so Estella and I having written a book that's meant to be a tutorial, and also each having done quite a bit of work on MD, and she's done quite a bit more than I have, but we've both done a lot of work on MDN writing pages that have to have at least some tutorial element to them in examples. And she's actually written full tutorials on MDN. So we wrote a tutorial kind of.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it was super interesting to see the different takes on this. And when I walked in late, I asked a question, we were going to make our joking one. It wasn't actually joking. It was based on an idea that I had, but it was completely fictional. And I was like, does it have to be a real thing or can it be a thing that you want to exist? And lots of people were kind of groaned, but I was like, but it seems like a legit question. And I think I wasn't the only one that did something that wasn't yet implemented in all the browsers. So you don't know. To some degree it's in process. But yeah, it's interesting. EC did one on the A element.
Eric Meyer: Yep.
Brian Kardell: And Emilio, and I'm sorry, I don't remember who was with Emilio, but they did a fantastic one that was really cool. I think it won second place.
Eric Meyer: Was that the dark light one?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it was like the dark, dark light one. And it was amazing because in their demo, they didn't realize until they were done with their demo, they found three bugs that they were able to report to other browsers just in making that demo
Eric Meyer: Really cool. And then the winter,
Brian Kardell: It's cool, but it's not cool because we should have, there should already be tests and bugs for those. But yeah, it is very cool
Eric Meyer: Still. And then the winner, what were they demonstrating?
Brian Kardell: I don't honestly remember what they were demonstrating, but it was fantastically cool. It was this whole parallax thing with look like Super Mario Brothers kind of as you scrolled, the stuff changed and it was very involved. I feel like maybe they must have had done that somewhere else or something and just had a bunch of notes and snippets and things. Contact said all of his styling and everything was stuff that he had already done, so he just had to write the tutorial part and follow that guidebook that he had for himself. But yeah, I mean, it was fun in the end. It was nice to do that. But I think also maybe it leads to the last thing that I want to say about events like this is that I don't know about you, but I am not super social in my regular day-to-Day life, and I have even social anxiety and man, this is a lot. I mean, you're on from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed.
Eric Meyer: Yeah
Brian Kardell: Just, well, you're social, social, social and in meetings. And for me, I don't know. It's draining. I'm tired. My brain is tired. Today almost. If we were not doing this, I might have just been like, I need a day.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, Yeah. It is for people who are not naturally extroverts and you and I are not. Yeah, it can be very draining. The social batteries get real depleted and yeah, I guess to the point where, okay, the meetings are actually kind of a recharge moment because you're not necessarily talking to anyone else. You're listening and maybe you're taking notes or whatever, but, and at the same time, it is the kind of social interaction that even though it may be draining, you're not skipping any of it if you can possibly avoid it, you're sitting with people at lunch. Anyone could have taken up and maybe some people did take a plate and then not sit with a table of other people, sit off to the side or take it up to their room or whatever if they're staying at that hotel. And that's always an option. And yet it was never an option. I think that either of us took, I think there was one night, was it Monday night? I think it was. Yeah, I think Monday night after dinner, some people were going to the bar and I was like, yeah, no, I'm going back to my room. Thanks. I appreciate it, but I need to go do some stuff. And the stuff that I needed to go do was just decompress. But for the most part, yeah,
Brian Kardell: That's like the kind of flip side of this is that while it's a weird contradiction because I come back and I'm so drained, but also I'm so energized about the web and the topics and the
Eric Meyer: Right,
Brian Kardell: Yeah. The thing I'm energized about is maybe emotionally it can feel really, a lot of the things that we work on, they span years and it can feel like, oh my God, there's so much stuff. And it doesn't feel like any of it is moving. It's just disheartening, and maybe these people are just blocking me. And then you get together and a bunch of stuff happens and you see momentum and you meet with the people who you feel like might be blocking, and they're clearly not. They're just also really busy. And yeah, I don't know. I find it a strange contradiction in a way that it's like my social battery is so drained at the end of it, but I'm also somehow really energized.
Eric Meyer: So socially drained, but professionally revved up. So let's wrap it up.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I don't know that there's anything else left to say. I think that's TPAC in a nutshell.
Eric Meyer: Part of the thing about TPAC is that we could probably keep talking for hours about, there are things we could say for hours, but at the same time that gets into the weeds. And if anyone's really interested in what your favorite working group did during TPAC, go to see if they have any notes from meetings. Most of them, I think were captured in one way or another, some of them into actual GitHub issues and others sort of to the working group pages. So yeah, look for those.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, we'll link to the TPAC site and you can kind of surf around and maybe find the minutes. Yeah. Awesome.
Eric Meyer: Well, it was good to see you and TPAC, sir.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, definitely. Good to see you and to hang out and to eat some good food with you.
Brian Kardell
Eric Meyer