Holy wars and the CSS-in-JS fight (2m38s)

Bruce Lawson opens with a list of generational holy wars — Beatles or Stones, vinyl or CD, tabs or spaces — to set up the current one: writing CSS in stylesheets versus writing CSS in JavaScript, an argument he summarises by impersonating both sides.

"I'm not talking about the holy wars that we have — every industry has them"

"basically one side says, CSS is completely unsuitable for styling modern web applications... and the other side say, oh yeah, well you're just a backend developer with no idea how the web is meant to work"

"thus opinions are divided, ideas are entrenched, and everybody has a fight"

Why working with CSS in components is hard (6m19s)

CSS in components hurts because everything is globally namespaced, the cascade order is fragile, and your CSS is silently coupled to your HTML — change either side and something somewhere on a page nobody visited will quietly break.

"everything in CSS is globally namespaced, which means that you always have a problem worrying about whether styles are going to leak"

"HTML doesn't care about your CSS, but your CSS cares deeply about your HTML structure"

"the scariest thing in the world for me was changing the CSS of the Law Society website... something would break because I changed the CSS — always, but it might take weeks before somebody actually went to that page"

Wix's Stylable preprocessor (10m29s)

Working with Wix, his colleague Ido prototyped Stylable — a CSS preprocessor that gives you a TypeScript-style type system over CSS, scoped pseudo-classes for component state, chained pseudo-elements for nested parts, and build-time rule-shaking so unused styles are removed.

"we needed it to be performant. We wanted to be able to use all the capabilities that CSS offers — the whole spec, all the cool great stuff like flexbox and grid"

"we deliberately chose this syntax so that it feels like CSS, so that people who are designers and not engineers will be able to grok this instantly"

"ruleset-shaking, which is similar to tree-shaking — so any CSS that's not being used in this particular page... is removed at build time"

Frameworks, artisanship and Shokunin (20m52s)

Bruce welcomes the industry professionalising and explicitly refuses the Luddite framing — frameworks are fine, just please make the websites you ship with them genuinely better — but borrows the Japanese concept of shokunin to argue that an artisan attitude needs to survive the toolchain.

"if you want to React-Ember-Angular-Backbone-Strap-Hub-Pack.js, knock yourself out"

"shokunin... it means not only having technical skill but implies an attitude and social consciousness, social obligation to work his or her best for the general welfare of people"

"we shouldn't lose that artisan mentality... another computer science term, giving a shit about the end product"

Bangkok, MS, and Jooly's Joint (23m28s)

A pivot into autobiography: in 1999, working in Bangkok, Bruce was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the only English-language information he was given was photocopied autopsy photographs, and he went to an internet café and discovered Jooly's Joint — a global support network for people living with MS that ended up changing his life.

"the only English language information they could give me was xeroxed from a medical textbook, and the illustrations were encouraging photographs of autopsied brains"

"I typed in 'multiple sclerosis' into AltaVista... and I found this — Jooly's Joint, a global support network for people who live with MS"

"I'm talking through the computer with people from the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland... this blew my mind"

The web is people (26m36s)

The follow-up: he eventually met Jooly herself when commissioning an accessibility book back in the UK, and the friendship that followed crystallised what the web actually is — not computers, not clouds, not tubes, but a network for connecting human beings.

"what is the web? It's not computers — it's powered by computers, but it's not computers"

"the web is people. It's about communicating with people"

"my degree is English literature and drama, and I got into the web because I'm interested in communicating"

Asia, Africa and where growth actually is (28m12s)

Half the world's population lives inside the circle bounded by Asia and that's where the customers actually are — China's Double 11 took $9.2 billion online to Black Friday's $2.9 billion — and by 2100 Africa is projected to have five billion people on its way to becoming the bigger story.

"more than 50% of the population of the world live inside this circle"

"Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US took 2.9 billion dollars online. On Double 11 day... in China... they took 9.2 billion online"

"by 2100... when global population will peak at 11 billion people... there will be five billion people living in Africa"

Digital divides and locally relevant content (33m30s)

The biggest barriers to web access in 12 of 13 surveyed African countries aren't affordability or coverage — they're awareness, digital skills and the lack of locally relevant content. 50% of websites are in English; only 0.1% are in Hindi.

"lack of awareness of locally relevant content"

"50% of the websites are in English, although that's only spoken by 10% of the population"

"seven of ten people in Africa who do not use the internet say they don't know how to use it, and four of ten don't know what it is"

PWAs, responsive images and the cost to users (41m00s)

Ship a PWA, not a native app — a 20MB binary download takes 30 minutes on a flaky Indian connection and competes with the user's family photos for space — and shrink your images, because the average 3.3MB page costs a Nigerian 28 hours of work to download on entry-level mobile broadband.

"downloading a typical native app of 20MB takes 30 minutes in India and is most likely to fail because of flaky network connections"

"25% of new Android devices ship with only 512MB of RAM and limited storage space. With space that's limited, the user is comparing their personal photo collection with the adoption of a new app"

"in Germany... you work for one hour. In the States you work for six hours. In Nigeria you work for 28 hours"

Guardians of the web (44m39s)

The closing call: the YouTube child-abuse generators, Amazon's bot-generated scam products, Facebook's amplification of violence in Myanmar — the big platforms profit and the developers who build for them are the only people in a position to keep calling out what their tools are being used for.

"these big companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter — these are not neutral platforms. If you have these platforms that you're making money from, you have an ethical duty and a responsibility"

"you are the Thomas Telfords and the Isambard Kingdom Brunels of this new industrial revolution — do it wisely"

"if my hippie bullshit has offended you, let's look at some money"