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**Alex Sexton:** Like an issue tracker... |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, it's basically like a Honeypot for broken web pages... And we've got a small team that goes in and tries to triage... But it's like an open community effort; anybody can contribute, diagnose, do outreach etc. But we use that to try to help us understand "What does the web really look like? What's... |
That shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who has developed more than one web page and opened it in two browsers. It's all hacks, and there's bugs, and you want certain features but they only exist on one browser, so it's kind of like this big mess. That's a lot of fun and has a lot of potential. |
\[20:10\] Just to spitball a couple examples off the top of my head... You can tell me when to stop talking, and I will. |
**Alex Sexton:** No, keep going. |
**Mike Taylor:** One thing that's really common, a problem for Firefox for Android users is there's this streaming video format called hls - I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with that... That stands for HTTP Live Streaming. So this is not a web standard, it's not like MPEG-Dash or MSE... We have these standards that e... |
Apple went and they created this other version, which is really popular. I don't know why it's popular; it might be way easier to use. But basically, what you could do is you have a manifest file, it's called an m3u8 file, and that's literally just a text file with a list of MPEG-TS segments. You stick that in the vide... |
It's not an open standard, so that means you can't freely implement this, if that makes sense. You might have to pay some money to some people... And I'm being careful here, I don't wanna use the p-word because then we're all subpoenaed, and... \[laughter\] Right. |
So Gecko doesn't implement this, because it's not free as in free stuff, and so... |
**Alex Sexton:** You nailed that one... \[laughs\] |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, thank you. Shoutout to my spiritual mentor, Richard Stallman. \[laughter\] So people go to look at their favorite live streaming web pages, which are typically not PG-13, and it doesn't work, and that's really frustrating, and they report this bug to us. So we come to understand that "Whoa, there... |
**Alex Sexton:** This is like the classic Betamax vs. VHS story, isn't it? |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, a little bit. \[laughter\] What was the other one...? It was like HD DVD... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, versus Blu-ray. |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah. So another one of these things that I'm working on right now is called Window.Event. It's this global event object, and if you know what this is, I'm amazed, and hopefully you don't use it in your code... This is something that IE invented. They had a different event model before the W3C came up ... |
**Alex Sexton:** addEvent? |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah... attachEvent." |
**Alex Sexton:** attachEvent, yeah. |
**Mike Taylor:** And as part of that, you had this global event object. So when you're inside of an event handler, you can just access it by calling event.target, or... It was called "source element", but same thing. And so the W3C was like "No, we're gonna do our own thing called addEventListener" - I think they copie... |
If you've ever written some JavaScript, you'll know that when you're writing your little onclick=function and you pass in sometimes an e, or an ev, or an event, you can use that guy inside of your event handler, your callback. |
So it turns out IE invented this thing, and Safari, back when it was actually KHTML - so this was before Apple even forked... Some crazy Norwegians in Oslo made this - they were called Trolltech... They made a browser engine which turned into KHTML, and they had to implement that for compatibility to get some banks run... |
\[24:04\] So then Safari has it, people start probably copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow, and it just keeps on working because you had no idea this was even a thing, and it works in Chrome and it works in Edge, because they forked from IE. |
So this is one of these things where you're like, "Oh, we should just spec this and call it -- it's part of the web platform, it's ugly, it's historical..." Yeah, so this is something -- I'm working with [Anne van Kesteren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_van_Kesteren) who is a web standards wizard; he works on HTML... |
**Wes Bos:** You're saying the event is just not standardized? |
**Mike Taylor:** So the event object is standardized. Having a global variable that references that event... |
**Wes Bos:** Oh, I see! |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** That's such a terrible architecture... It's so obviously wrong that it's beautiful that 10-15 years later we were all forced to implement it as a standard. \[laughter\] |
**Mike Taylor:** We're stuck with it. So in your work, when you started programming, global variables were amazing, right? And then as it became more sophisticated, you're like "Oh, wait... These cause and create pain." |
I don't know what the moral to that story is... You know, this is the technical debt of the web, basically. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I think we're running off on a break, but we'll get back with some hot text after the break. |
**Break:** \[25:54\] |
**Alex Sexton:** And we're back. So I wanted to ask both of you a question that is not like a normal question that we ask on the show but I often find interesting, especially since both of you have ended up in standards and teaching and stuff like that, rather than necessarily directly creating -- I think we've all don... |
So I'm interested in how you got into web development. Do you have computer science degrees, and did you do web stuff when you were 10, or was it your MySpace page? Wes, how about you? |
**Wes Bos:** Yeah, it was my MySpace page. That's exactly how I got into it... \[laughs\] Which I don't know if you knew that or not, but... |
**Alex Sexton:** No. |
**Wes Bos:** ...pretty standard for folks like me, I guess. I initially got into it way back when I was sort of in the music scene, and that allowed me to build MySpaces for bands, and that turned into doing T-shirts and CD art, and from there I just started charging, and then I worked all the way through grade school,... |
I've been at it for probably 10-15 years, but I've probably built some sites even before that. |
**Alex Sexton:** So you're primarily self-taught? |
**Wes Bos:** \[28:08\] Yeah. Well, I would say entirely self-taught. I went to school for what's called "Business technology management", so I have a business degree that's focused on running IT. Generally, they sort of like -- you go to work at banks and stuff, and run the IT infrastructure, and you work on projects a... |
**Alex Sexton:** It's very interesting, because your primary job is a teacher, whether it's via the tutorials or via HackerYou school. |
**Wes Bos:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** That comes across to me in a way... I was programming on MySpace, but I really came up through members.aol.com before MySpace. But I was in the MySpace scene for sure. I have a computer science degree, and it's interesting to me how many of the people who write very good, relatable tutorials for people... |
**Wes Bos:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** It's such a relatable position. |
**Mike Taylor:** I think people with computer science degrees by nature lack empathy... \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Do you have a computer science degree...? |
**Mike Taylor:** No, I don't... So my story -- it's kind of interesting. I studied linguistics in school; I did a bachelor's and I ended up working towards a PhD at NYU... |
**Alex Sexton:** I was very disappointed whenever you did not finish. Me and your mom. |
**Mike Taylor:** Yeah, I dropped out, and Alex and my mom are still working through this. My wife was not sad, by the way. |
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