the extensible web

In June 2013, we published the Extensible Web Manifesto, declaring that the web platform should be built a series of extensible layers. Low-level capabilities, like hardware access, cryptography, or the parser, should be exposed to web developers through JavaScript, and higher-level features, like HTML tags or animations, should be explained in terms of those primitives. This allows JavaScript developers to extend the web platform without rewriting it from scratch in JavaScript, customizing it for the needs of their applications and creating a virtuous cycle wherein web developers prototype higher-level features that implementers can later pull in. In this talk, I want to explore the concrete meaning of the extensible web. What initiatives already under way can we see through this lens? What ideas are still gestating, and need your input as a web developer? How will this new philosophy end up impacting you? I want to show you the future of the web platform, where developers like you are involved from the beginning in designing and prototyping APIs, and have enough low-level tools at your fingertips to solve any problem you face. And I want to bring it all back to our favorite language, JavaScript, which is the glue that makes this all work together. In text format at http://domenic.me/2013/10/07/the-extensible-web/