We Need to Talk About the Front Web Part 2: The Three Strengths of the Front Web
This article is the second part of a series of articles written as basis for the talk I gave for FFConf 2023.
You may want to read the part 1 of this series.
In 1993, for my first job I've started working for a Brazilian representative of a former American company called Interleaf. Interleaf was a software editor specialised in the creation and distribution of technical documentation and its clients were mostly companies that needed to produce a huge amount of it, like companies respecting the ISO9000 standards or IATA (The International Air Transport Association).
In order to have an idea of how heavily these companies had to rely on technical documentation, we used to say that if you printed all the documentation needed to maintain and fly a Boeing, and you put it inside the plane, it wouldn't take off. Well, yes, sales speech, but you get the idea.
At the time, many companies were using Interleaf solutions to create and distribute their technical documentation.
The difference with other word processors like WordPerfect — I bet you've never heard of it — or Word, was that Interleaf solutions wasn't meant to print: the idea was to make clients save money in printing by producing and distributing content in digital format.
They were pretty visionary, I think, even when people weren't completely ready to consult text on a computer screen yet.
It was thrilling working with it. But, at some point, I've asked to myself what would happen if Interleaf disappeared? How clients would be able to continue to produce and consult their docs with solutions that would stop evolving or that would no longer be maintained?
Of course, this problem wasn't Interleaf specific, but with WordPerfect, Word, etc., a huge amount of content in proprietary format would no longer be usable, with a huge amount of time and money lost. An Interleaf document could only be accessed by an Interleaf software, the same way as a Word file can only be edited with MS Word — in a serious way, at least.
It wouldn't surprise me if Interleaf clients were still struggling with their docs today.
And then came the web, and with it the possibility of creating and distributing content in digital format, exactly like Interleaf solutions, but with two aditional features that made all the difference: hypertext and open standards.
The Web is an Open Standard
Contrary to Interleaf or other proprietary platform, the web does not depend on a private company that may one day get tired of it, or realize that it is not making enough money and simply make it disappear: thanks to CERN and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web platform became of public domain in 1993. The web is ours.
The web does not depend of a private company, and they do not like it; that's why they are always trying to create more and more silos, so web users are unconsciously trapped in a controled space, where companies can make money with our content.
To own your content is one of the principals of the indieweb.
Standards are those invisible, unnoticeable, yet powerful set of specifications that defines and describes procedures, norms or technologies.
From the simplest things, like the radius of a shower faucet valve, to more sensible procedures like the way airlines exchange flight schedule data with airports, standards are everywhere, much for our luck. Standards allows us to save a lot of time and useless money by investing them in robust and stable systems.
Besides being a standard, web technologies are open; that means that virtually anybody can participate in writing the standards with the W3C. We are owners, users and actors on the web.
Since the so called version 5 of HTML, the dynamic of web standards increased significantly by becaming what we call “living standards”: standards that are always evolving. From now on, we don't have to wait, for example, a year for a new version, or six months for a new release. As standards evolve, browsers apply the new features gradually.
As an open standard, the universality of content becomes part of the architecture of the web, making it accessible no matter the kind of connection we have — high or low speed —, the software or user agent we use, the width of your device; it doesn't matter where we are in the globe, it doesn't matter which language we speak. There's no other medium in the world with such power.
Standards will also assure for a future-friendly content: our content will evolve with the standards and will always stay relevant, unlike proprietary media, like Blackberry, we won't have to throw everything out and start again with something else.
The Web Promotes Content/Style/Behavior Separation
The front web technologies are based in three different layers: the HTML, that marks up the content; the CSS, that lays “above” the content in order to define lay-out and style; and finally an optional layer of Javascript, that may introduce behavior and interaction.
As Jeremy Keith puts it in his book “Resilient Web Design”, this separation of layers on the web “allows for a loosely‐coupled system where if a piece fails, it won't impact the others”. So, if CSS or JavaScript fails (yep!), this won't impact the access to HTML (aka. our content).
The content/style/behavior separation approach gives us the power of a scalable content: if three years from today we want to make a new design for our web site, we will just touch the CSS; we don't need to touch the HTML. In this way we can focus our work on what it is about: style, layout.
If our content can “live” independently from its style or behavior, it means it is reusable: we see that all the time with the search engines that use portions of our content elsewhere. Or we can reuse parts of a website somewhere else in the web.
The content/style/behavior separation give us a resilient, scalable and reusable content.
The Web is Semantic
Another unique strength of the web is semantics — unfortunately, a very ignored strength.
Ignoring them (semantics) can undermine the usability of the content we’re marking up. When we create a web page, we need to be mindful of the conversation we are creating with our customers in the process, and choose elements with intent and care.
– Aaron Gustafson, Conversational Semantics
HTML allows us to give meaning to our content by “marking-up” our code with semantics. Semantics convey information not only to screen reader users, but also to any system capable of interpreting HTML (Alexa, Cortana, bots, etc.), anywhere and everywhere. Semantics makes our content meaningful, accessible and retrievable. As far as I know, there is no other media capable of doing that today.
The architecture of the web makes content reusable, retrievable, accessible, future-friendly, resilient.