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**Jerod Santo:** Hopping in between them. |
**Guillermo Rauch:** So there's nothing like the web in that ability to connect ideas, people, applications and documents. |
**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. I will name-drop VRBO, which is like a vacation rental web -- think of it like an Airbnb for vacation rentals... And they have a website which has the URL of a vacation rental, and you can share that URL. My sister shares it with me on iOS, inside the Messages app, and I click on that, and ... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah. It's not what we were promised. At the end of the day, it comes down to user experience. I wanna tap, I want to get this experience... If it's limited because I need to grant more permissions to the system, or I need to log in, or I need to pay for something, I think that's understandable. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, give a reason. |
**Guillermo Rauch:** But it has to be a smooth transition. I think only the web can do that today, and it's still to be seen whether PWA is what takes us all the way through that transition... But I would say any company will see better results when they give their customers ultimately what they want, which is - in my ... |
**Amal Hussein:** Yeah. I have to echo -- a couple shout-outs to some web APIs that I think have helped smooth the link communication in mobile apps... The Web Share API - I don't know if y'all are familiar or remember it. It's not that old. Essentially, it's a way for you to share information, with anything, from your... |
So there's just so many uphill battles that I've seen for the web. We're still very much in the thick of it, specifically also for new internet users, like folks coming online for the first time. There's millions of people in Brazil and in India coming online for the first time every year, and they're kind of learning ... |
\[12:17\] So the web has a lot of catch-up to do, I would say, in certain areas... But obviously, if you take the accessibility of the web and you kind of supercharge it with the powers of native apps, that's what you're supposed to get with progressive web apps, and potentially projects like FUGU from Chrome. |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah. Another thing I'll add there - you were mentioning there's these APIs that are really powerful and they exist... I think what we're gonna see over the next few years - we're gonna catch up to the reality that you can actually create a much better mobile web experience today than you probably ... |
I see just low-hanging fruit in the sense of like it's clear that the development team or the creator has been thinking desktop-first, and then there's this kind of mismatch of capability that -- and all these people might still want to request the desktop site, because this function that they're used to using on deskt... |
Now, conversion is probably much better on desktop, or if the user chooses to install a native app... But that's in a lot of cases because we haven't engineered the web well enough for mobile. Performance is not there, so that's another low-hanging fruit example of -- a detail I like to point out is a key difference be... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** And that's not a battle that you're losing because native has all this low-level optimizations, GPU, whatever... In a lot of cases you haven't even tried to optimize your mobile website. A cool example here is hover styles delay taps on iOS, especially hover styles that have been left from desktop ... |
So that's what I'm really excited about. I know that iOS won't give us every API that we want, and they have conflicting business interests, and security concerns... But even today, we can make things so much better. |
**Jerod Santo:** So that might come down to tooling, to a certain degree, because a lot of those things that lack is not because the lack of thoughtfulness or desire by the developer, or the team, or the company... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** \[16:13\] Absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oftentimes it's because of priorities, and constraints, and money... The externalities, so to speak. And they just don't have either the knowledge they need to even know how to accomplish what you've just described, how to avoid that thing that looks clunky, or they don't have the time to do it... And ... |
So from your two's perspective, in 2020, as we're turning the corner to 2021, what was the state of the art in web development? I know that there's debates about "What is state of the art?", but in your guys' opinion, currently - not where it's gonna be tomorrow, or next year; but in 2020, what are people using, what a... |
**Amal Hussein:** Do you wanna start, Guillermo? |
**Guillermo Rauch:** Yeah... Obviously, I wanna preface by saying we have a pretty opinionated viewpoint, in that we create a React-based framework, Next.js. It's obviously very popular. But at Vercel, our platform works on top of the web platform, on open standards. We let you import projects like Next.js, or any othe... |
So from the perspective of developer experience, I think, the state of the art is clearly collaborating on top of React components; I mentioned collaborating because one of the modern trends is for companies, organizations, teams to agree on a shared toolkit, a designed system, a set of reusable components that they ca... |
React has enabled the web platform developers to agree on a standard to encapsulate that look and feel in behavior. The best example here is we used to have templating languages, especially on monolithic server-side-first frameworks, like Ruby on Rails etc. And to a great extent, a template language can combine both HT... |
What React has done, in my mind, has been this introduction of a greater possibility of composability, especially with hooks. Now we can encapsulate look, and also behavior. We can even take hooks and share the behavior part and apply them to different components. So it's like playing with Lego bricks that have effects... |
\[19:39\] To me, the state of the art looks like teams that don't just know JavaScript, HTML and CSS, they also know how to encapsulate that knowledge into reusable components. React is a platform, it's a reality in my mind. And I mention React as a platform because React embeds things that are not very intuitive if yo... |
So to me, the React platform is here, it's real, it's making people really productive, it's making developers happy... Now, the other side of the coin is is it making users happy? Because we have all these sophisticated libraries, and you use a lot of JS, and you can render on the client side, and all these things - it... |
The state of 2020 is we've gotten a lot of power, but we're starting to use it in the ways that are really performant for end users... And the trends that are interesting to me there is somewhat of a return to the server-side rendering world, but slightly different, because with JAMstack we have server rendering at bui... |
**Break:** \[22:47\] |
**Amal Hussein:** Listening to you, I was like "Oh wow, you're describing so many of the things that I practice on my own..." Like, inside of teams, or within our company, things that we practice... I'm like "Yes. Check, check, check. That's great." But that being said, I think for me, +1 to everything that Guillermo's... |
I would say React specifically for me is -- the API is just getting, I would say, more and more confusing, and/or maybe is trying to do too much, with concurrent mode and all this other stuff. I'm not quite sure I'm personally on board with that just yet, and I'm speaking as somebody who's used the tools since early da... |
So I would say that it might be kind of the beginning of a shift; kind of a pendulum shift is what I see happening, where folks are gonna be going a little more pure. So I think React really did a wonderful thing of bringing inside of this crazy land of templating and custom domain knowledge, where you're mostly using ... |
But I think now we're realizing there's a lot of performance gains to be made by reducing complexity even in the tooling layer. So do we really need virtual DOM? I'd say no. Do we need all these other things? You can architect yourself out of problems that maybe React is trying to solve. So in that sense, for me it's l... |
I think abstracting away complexity for developers actually also means a better and healthier web... Because a developer is not gonna test something on every browser, or make sure the web pages are accessible. So the better our tooling gets, and the more widespread that tooling can be, the better the entire web will be... |
So we just need to think about how we're gonna keep moving our code forward with the web. I think tooling is a big part of that, so "How do we distribute that tooling?" is the question... More effectively than we are now. Because I think it's very siloed right now. I think the modern web development level for me is too... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, we're definitely on the inside of the bubble, and listeners to JS Party, and Amal's podcast - we're definitely on the forefront of that. But for people who haven't been so close to the edge... Guillermo, you mentioned JAMstack, you mentioned pre-rendering - these are things that are going on. I t... |
**Guillermo Rauch:** \[28:26\] Yeah. And I like what Amal said with regards to tooling being the fundamental investment that we need to make. That doesn't stop at React, but component systems like Sveltes and Vues are also extremely suitable for the modern web... And what we're seeing there as well is that there's fram... |
And for those of you that are familiar with JAMstack - JAMstack was a movement or principle that said "Well, the web should be static...", but not static in the sense of just do everything on the client-side with JS, meaning you give an empty index.html file that loads some JS, but also within JAMstack is two other ide... |
So what JAMstack brought was a set of constraints that said "Well, it will be static, and it will be cached at the edge." The problem with that, as it turned out, is people have also very good reasons for dynamically rendering pages. |
**Jerod Santo:** Amen. |
**Guillermo Rauch:** And also, sites of a certain size can not just pre-render every page... And together with all of that, when we're talking about mobile web versus native, a tremendous advantage that I see for the web is that when you tap on a link, it can render just in time the page just for you, without you havin... |
The web has this magical -- and it goes back to my concept of the hyperlink... You go to this hyperlink, and it's almost like a black box; you don't know what's gonna come out on the other side. And that has this beauty of "I can give you the specific set of code, I can give you the specific HTML, and the specific CSS ... |
So this concept that we pioneered with Next.js, this is what frankly drove and got us the attention from Google Chrome's team, that started contributing directly to Next.js, because it matched very well what they'd seen internally at Google as being the best ways to scale really large sites and really large application... |
\[32:14\] It's always with a combination of CDN caching for the parts that are known to be static, but also leveraging what I call the power asymmetry of the world, which is - the average mobile phone in India, which is the Xiaomi Redmi phone, is not gonna be as powerful as a server's pre-warmed with all your applicati... |
So I think one of the ways forward for the web will be to acknowledge that there is no silver bullet where you say "Oh, if I make everything static, and if I JAMstack this or that, I'm gonna get great performance", because you might also limit the ability to customize, personalize and create very dynamic content just f... |
The example I like to give here is when Facebook launched the new Facebook.com built entirely on top of React, which was supposed to be this engineering marvel, because the open web is so introspectible and debuggable, a developer went ahead and inspected it and realized that they weren't even using CSS that much. They... |
And the box shadow one was particularly puzzling to me, because I remember the old days of the web, where we didn't have the box shadow property, and we had to use background images... Or not even background images, we had these image tags. And Facebook was doing that because they realized that for that particular elem... |
So performance is not just a matter of like you downloaded that box shadow property in-line into the HTML really quickly from the edge. That obviously is gonna help. But then begins this other complete new box of surprises, or Pandora box of performance. And that's where the Web Vitals metrics that Google has created a... |
But then you realize "Okay, I gave that to the web browser, and now the web browser is struggling with rendering box shadows, or Intercom widgets, and GDPR pop-ups, and all the layout is shifting, and there's three cookie banners, and another one to accept the terms of service... Actually, that one is fresh from today. |
\[35:54\] Today I went to a website... This is a marketing website. And it was presenting two blocking modals. One to accept Terms of Service, and I was like "Terms of Service of what? I'm just visiting this website." And the other one is a massive GDPR modal. And both of those things kind of came in a little later... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. You're just starting to see it, and then they pop in. |
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