Keynote: Why web tech is like this - Steve Sanderson

Ever wondered why browsers look like they do? Why we use port 80, or why it’s img src=… and not image source=… ? How did JS and CSS take over, and what could there have been instead? Who invented modern web dev tooling, and how have your favourite server and client frameworks been battling it out? Where are the latest wave of metaframeworks trying to take us next?
Let’s explore it though demos! We’ll compile and run the first-ever web server and browser, and experiment live with many other landmark tools and frameworks from across the decades. In each case, we’ll try to spot what influence remains today, revealing modern web dev as a mixture of brilliant innovations, terrible mistakes, and lucky moments.

[@MladenMihajlovic]

I love how humble Steve is, but he is also one of those special developers who have pushed the web tech way forward with his work - Knockout and Blazor!

[@Eirenarch]

His humbleness makes the session worse. Because of it he omitted knockout.js and didn't mention he created Blazor :)

[@PaulFWatts]

Fantastic presentation, and very brave with all the live demonstrations! Well done!

[@ArneBab]

Getting all that old tech working is pretty awesome! Thank you for sharing!

[@abhinavkant]

This is one of the greatest videos about web development on internet.

[@steveleeatfullmeasure]

Excellent and I felt nostalgic seeing all that old stuff again. thanks for mentioning WAI.

[@timgo2345]

This presentation is insanely good. Steve Sanderson never disapoints

[@jj342]

Great presentation! As a new web developer this gives me a deeper understanding of current technologies and how they evolved. Thanks!

[@andytroo]

"hardware from 20 years in the future - still what we recommend for Visual Studio" - :D

[@nothingisreal6345]

Still too slow.

[@larsthomasdenstad9082]

Exceptional talk, thanks Mr. Steven Sanderson.

[@VladislavSorokinPro]

wow, what a thrilling adventure the web dev is! (happy to be a part of it)

[@VincentParrett]

Fantastic presentaion - really enjoyed seeing all those blasts from the past.

[@hyksos999]

Been using knockoutjs since 2009! Works just fine in 2022... Steve knows what he is talking about

[@user-mr-m12312]

By the way, why did knockout lose its popularity to angular, react etc?

[@unnamed8526]

@@user-mr-m12312 Isnt that obvious? Knockout is by far not as good as modern, declarative UI Frameworks

[@sneer0101]

@@user-mr-m12312 It's massively overcomplicated and pretty messy, much like the original version of angular. Newer versions are much cleaner and readable, which is vital if another dev wants to pick up your code and get to work.

[@DonDrito]

Great presentation, especially the first part! A blast from the past, some of it experienced, some of it well before my time. Understandably, as time is limited and well, he's with MS so emphasis on some MS stuff of course, but he kind of jumped over some quite important bits: The whole Java ecosystem of server-side MVC web frameworks in the 00's well before RoR (Struts anyone?) culminating in the victory of Spring and Spring Boot, the early JS libraries (Prototype.JS and Scriptaculous , YUI, Mootools...), REST architecture, Flash???

[@jerankorak7997]

Actual presentation begins at 9:08.

[@sasukesarutobi3862]

Thank you, kind stranger!

[@magne6049]

lol, came here to comment the exact same timestamp, but you beat me to it. Thanks :D

[@BryonLape]

Thanks.

[@tomthunderforest1681]

Another great one from Steve. Thank you!

[@fieryscorpion]

That was pretty amazing. I always get my mind blown at every one of Steve's talks! Thank you!

[@judgewest2000]

This guy came up with knockout which for me is one of the most efficient and easy ways to make interactive sites! Kudos!

[@Andrei_Calazans]

Thank you for sharing this, Steve’s keynote is very insightful.

[@jaiderariza1292]

37:37 nostalgic. I remember using the VS web editor so great at the time and nothing like in the market... also I remember that most tutorials were in VB but later C# become more popular, and got more doc in C# than VB, so I change to C# programmer lol.

[@mwonsil]

Absolutely loved this walk through history.

[@_parassolanki]

Awesome talk absolutely loved this

[@caseygrzecka515]

Came for the nostalgia, stayed for the Svelte goodness.

[@CodeWithAnup]

What a great presentation it is

[@developerfriendly]

perfect presentation!!

[@paulbird2772]

27:00 The resounding win of course had nothing to do with it being a better product. Internet Explorer was bundled and integrated with Windows. The bundling to destroy Netscape's revenue stream, the integration aimed at making using anything other than IE a pain for the end users.

[@sabitkondakc9147]

Absorbing talk, thanks!

[@yv989c]

Aurelia deserves to be in that graph! 42:36

[@aquaductape]

Hell yeah solid-start!!!

[@richardclarke376]

Wow that takes me back!

[@dominuskelvin]

Amazing talk ❤

[@syrix5914]

This is a great talk

[@aspergale9836]

This was great!

[@cmw3737]

I remember wondering where CGI came from given that it was there so early and got superceded so quickly. I never did research it. And no mention of Java applets? They were a pretty significant addition to the web. And only slightly surprised he skipped Silverlight too given the largely .Net audience. As for the future I wonder how far the text to website AI language models will get us or whether that will just make debugging even harder.

[@graememuir6392]

He ignored technologies that ended up being dead ends. All the technologies he mentioned seemed to be integral to the current state of web development.

[@rohanrajpal]

I need those svelte snippets!!

[@arestiasprogerakas2449]

Opera is now an also-ran, but back in the day it was the best browser in the market. One of the few software products that I actually paid for. Have no idea why never had more that a small percentage of the market.

[@pillmuncher67]

3:27 - As a fan of the reefer I like that the plan for the Hypertext Server was to reefer to another server. That's not a bug, that's a roach.

[@pkop4]

Blazor Server and Phoenix Liveview are the new innovations

[@JLarky]

New if you ignore that it existed for more than 10 years :)

[@pkop4]

@@JLarky No. LiveView released in 2019, Blazor in 2018

[@JLarky]

@@pkop4 I know that, but 11 years ago we already used nitrogen project, Erlang based web framework that had exactly the same approach :)

[@MrMonday1000percent]

Would have loved a quick go over of JScript and how that came and went.

[@stewiegriffin6503]

high quality staff

[@kahnfatman]

Oh -- we have made a big LOOP with server side rendering (SSR) -- oh but back in the days it was called ASP. LOL.

[@WimDeblauwe]

I had no idea that PHP was an abbreviation for Personal HomePage!

[@leisti]

It's actually for Pretty Hinky Programming.

[@obinnaokafor6252]

❤❤

[@kentskyo]

Nice. A bit microsoft revisionist though, e.g. where's Java? :) But nod to ms for ajax early on (99) with xmlhttp. And before the browser wars, it was browser vs gopher :)

[@SamTheEnglishTeacher]

Ah yes Java, that short-lived memory hog of a language. Derived from JavaScript, which itself is derived from Microsoft's TypeScript. Yep the modern web is Microsoft all the way down 🤥

[@kentskyo]

@@SamTheEnglishTeacher Extraordinary! 🤣

[@deNudge]

Though I don't like them, I also missed a point about Serverless and all those cloud app creation platforms.

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

18:00 "Check spelling", eh? when it says "Excercises" right there on the screen :D

[@AmxCsifier]

01:01:10 SvelteKit

[@freelancer42]

"And you pretty much could never be down, because you'd have to bring down the entire global infrastructure to take down your website" > Cloudflare has joined the chat

[@tomrobertson5786]

Recommended to use with hardware from 20 years in the future 🤣😂

[@jj342]

Svelte

[@logiciananimal]

"Hey there" = Aussie version of "Hello, world!"?

[@nothingisreal6345]

This a very profound technical point of view. I think that most of that will become more and more obsolete. If you want to get things done, you need a HUGE number of developers and a MASSIVE effort - if it isn't trivial. The future will be: running stuff in a Cloud with all the pluming being there out-of-the box. Nobody does blog applications anymore. There are web applications that offer creating a blog application. Same for web-shops, payment services, document management ... The future of the web is stuff like MS Office Cloud, Google Cloud and development platforms that allow you to link data and react to events without any coding.

[@NeilHighley]

Where was interdev?

[@oliverhenning8758]

The greatest mistake of web development is that everyone just put up with the inherent limitations of the browser, HTTP, HTML and Javascript (which were all designed for multimedia documents, not for complex applications) and keeps trying to work around them instead of defining a new environment (programming language plus GUI Toolkit) that every browser would implement.

[@segwitchannel2042]

tech time travel.

[@jochenillerhausji]

The original idea of connecting everybody's notebooks sounds great but most of that newer stuff feels like expensive garbage...

[@noxiouspro]

PHP = Personal Homepage Tool? Where is the last "P" go!!!!???

[@JulianMelville]

Personal Home Pages

[@noxiouspro]

@@JulianMelville Ahh... Thank you.😆

[@andreyinkin8740]

Always thought PHP stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" :D

[@hansschenker]

Web History in about 1 hour! There are not many people who can present the Web History in such details like Steve Sanderson gave here! Thank's a lot for publishing! Steve Sanderson Author of Knockout.js - sill in use today!

[@BryonLape]

We don't invent new things. We invent different ways to do the same thing.

[@leslielugosi]

Pretty subjective retrospective over the sunglasses of Microsoft.

[@Hoowwwww]

why would i need to use a worse language for doing web development? javascript is enough, all these new stuff is the reason why web tech is trash

[@tinkeringengr]

Web dev is trash.

[@PhilBachmann]

Disappointing. As far as simple, unified web development is concerned, the real question isn't, "Where have we been?" or "Where are we going?" It's really, "Why haven't we gotten there yet?"

[@TheUArabej]

By there you mean where, good sir?

[@jj342]

To be or not to be...Wana study philosophy with me? Come to Taghazout Morocco

[@PhilBachmann]

​@@TheUArabej What Mr Sanderson calls, "Metaframeworks"... see 59:50

[@PhilBachmann]

@@jj342 I have no interest in philosophy, but would have like to hear Steve Sanderson explain why metaframeworks weren't available 20 years ago despite the technology and the money being available back then.

[@PhilBachmann]

@@jj342 Or to put it more simply: Why couldn't I write both browser code and server code in my favourite programming language 20 years ago?

[@JamesMCrutchley]

Tried watching. Got to 2 min and 29 sec with no audio and just static picture. I'm out. Nice try. Ty for wasting My time.

[@ahmedchampion3687]

do you actually know how to use KZbin?

[@lucianvasile2901]

a lot about Microsoft junk, too much

[@TheCameltotem]

Oh come on. He barely mentioned WASM and Blazor. Are you saying we should skip the whole .NET part just because he works at Microsoft? You can't rewrite the history.

[@jimiscott]

It's an NDC conference.

[@unextro]

@@TheCameltotem At 26:25 he conveniently skipped *how* Microsoft won that war (by abusing its monopoly) and managed to stall web development for decades until it finally cloned another browser and is now repeating it all over again...

[@obinnaokafor6252]

Stupid comment.

[@tomwillis4281]

I used all the applications on the early Internet that you mentioned at the time frames you listed. The Apple II application HyperCard (1987) gave the initial hyperlink idea for the early Web Browser (in my opinion). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard