As part of my yearly goals at work, I'm visiting a couple of events and conventions to keep my mind fresh and stay up to date with the latest developments in tech and design.
The first event I've visited is The Web You Want, hosted by CMD Amsterdam which I graduated from a few years ago.
This event was free of charge and hosted at the Amstel Campus in Amsterdam, right where I used to go for four years straight so it was a little nostalgic for me.
These are the people that did a talk:
Marleen Stikker
Hidde de Vries
Sanne Peters
Justus Sturkenboom
Niels Leenheer
Marleen Stikker
Marleen Stikker is the founder and CEO of Waag Futurelab, which is a research institute for technology and society. She has her own Wikipedia page which is pretty impressive.
Marleens talk was about the open social web. She spoke about how she was one of the founders of "De Digitale Stad", which was a dutch Freenet created in 1994, back when there were only about 300 individuals with access to the internet in the Netherlands. It served as an early type of social media, similar to Geocities in the way you could have your own page. It's a pretty interesting read on Wikipedia, and has become Unesco Memory of the World.
She spoke about how most of the web nowadays is owned by a couple of rich guys, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Which means there are a couple of things at stake when it comes to the free web:
We have no control over social spaces and our privacy
Everything has become algorithmic
Products spy on us (Such as robot vacuums!)
The military gets involved
Many people already feel like something needs to change.
But how?
According to Marleen, regulation is the key.
Regulation of the web would:
Open the market
Stimulate creativity
Welcome new entrepreneurs
Defends democracy
She goes on to talk about the Public Stack, which puts public values at the center and would lead to technologies that don't spy on us or sell our data.
You may have heard of the Fediverse, it's a series of websites that can interact with each other using the same protocol. What it's mainly about is that the Fediverse is decentralised. There is no single company (Such as Meta or Google) that controls it, which means users have control over their own data. This is something that Waag Futurelab is researching to see if a transition strategy can be developed.
Related to this Marleen mentioned RSS feeds. Which excited me as it's something I'm already involved in. An RSS feed is a standardised XML file format that allows users to access updates from websites in a reliable way. You can use aggregators such as Feeder to subscribe to different sites and keep track of new posts.
You can subscribe to the RSS feed of this site here, or here!
Lastly, she spoke about Eurosky, which is a starting point to get into the open social web.
Hidde de Vries
Hidde de Vries is specialised in front-end, accessibility and tech ethics. He is part of the W3C Advisory Board, which shows his dedication to making the web more accessible. Besides that, he works for the Dutch government and often does talks about his passions.
His talk was titles "A web that serves us all". which is divided up in five essential ingredients:
We need it to be sustainable
According to Hidde, emissions caused by IT are higher than emissions caused by the aviation industry. That's a bit of an eye opener. This is mainly caused by datacenters which emit a lot. In the Netherlands, these are for example the datacenters in Eemshaven and Middenmeer.
What Hidde stands for, is decreasing the "web footprint". W3C is working on guidelines to implement this called the "Web sustainability Guidelines".
He talks about how the size of a website can be decreased, and showed a tool called Websitecarbon which calculates your sites carbon footprint. sasjakoning.com scores a C by the way.
We need it to be ethical
At the moment, ethics teams are being fired across large companies such as Google which is bad as we need them now more than ever.
Hidde names a few ethical principles:
Respect for human dignity
Harm prevention
Explicability
Fairness
The web is full of dark patterns and data hoarders at the moment. Sites want all your data and try to keep you hooked.
We need it to be accessible
There is still a lot of inaccessibility on the web that needs to be taken care of. Such as missing keyboard navigation, missing alt texts and so on. A good example Hidde showed was an image of election results with no alt text which makes it hard to understand for people that cannot view the image.
However, a lot of things are improving as well. Browser defaults for form elements are improving, and native features such as dialogs and popovers are being made. More tools are paying attention to color contrast as well, such as Wordpress and Figma.
We need it to be fun
The web is getting quite boring. Many sites are starting to look the same, and AI isn't helping with that. We should try to make the fun web again, adding fun features and interesting visual designs.
We need it to be ours
Hidde thinks too much of the web belongs to corporations, to which I agree. Google, Meta, Amazon and so on have gotten way too large and are too focused on profit. They're full of algorithms that cause polarisation and are taking part in "Enshittification".
Hidde talks about how LinkedIn doesn't allow text to be turned to links, and how Instagram doesn't allow clickable links at all except for a single one in a users profile. What the hell?
We cannot trust large companies. Many of them are friends with people like Trump, and a bunch are mentioned in the files as well. Brrr. They remove the incentive to have our own websites, which is a shame because having your own site is great. With it, you can be annoying to people about how you write stuff on your blog. It's one of my favourite things to do.
So to summarise:
Sustainable
Check your site and start making it smaller.
Ethical
Embrace ethics in your process.
Accessible
Use platform features, CMSes and design systems.
Fun
Watch CSS Day videos to learn what's possible (And just stay nerdy in general).
Ours
Publish on your places before publishing anywhere else.
Sanne Peters
Sanne Peters is into front-end development, information design and design systems. Her talk was titled "A kinder and gentler web".
In it she spoke about how the web is sometimes forces upon you, many actions require you to use the web which can be hard to keep up with.
According to Sanne, the web should be easy, safe and pleasant. She came up with a few simple ideas to potentially make the web better.
Bad website - reporter tool
A button available on every site (As an extension perhaps) that can be used to report a site when it's bad for the web (Uses dark patterns, collects too much data, is inaccessible etc). When reported it gets added to an open registry that everyone can access.
A subscription scheme that's fair
Sanne mentioned a type of subscription scheme that is situation/location based, so people that have less to go by pay a lower amount than others.
At the end of her talk, Sanne suggested the audience to expand their worldview, by going outside of your bubble, reading books and watching content from places you've never been to.
Justus Sturkenboom
Justus Sturkenboom is a lecturer at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, more specifically FDND (Frontend Design & Development) and others. He is most interested in Philosophy and Computer Science.
Justus held a pretty wild talk titled "Close reading four seemingly simple words".
In this talk he went into the details of the words "The Web You Want". It got pretty philosophical and much of it went over my head but I'll try to write it down.
The
Is this conference about THE web or could it be A web?
The is something both parties know, a could be anything, it is to be discovered.
So when we say the web you want, its assumed everyone knows what kind of web we want. Whereas a web you want could be a web we haven't discovered yet.
Web
What is the content and extend of the word web?
A web is built by one spider, the World Wide Web is built by billions.
Besides spider references, Justus talked about weaving patterns and compared them to the web. He said that "Hyperlinks are the webbing of the web". Which makes sense in a way, hyperlinks connect sites and pages to each other. I think a fun experiment would be to visit a random blog, and just start clicking hyperlinks. See how far you can go.
You
Is it really me being addressed? Is there a hidden agenda in there and what if you change you to they?
Did the organiser of this event assume that the web presented there would be the web I want? What if I don't know what kind of web I want?
And it it's the web they want, who is they? The people doing talks?
Want
Want expresses a desire. How can we understand this desire? The main takeaway of this is that we need to love the web enough to care for it. To want to care for it.
Niels Leenheer
Niels Leenheer is passionate about web standards and open source. he runs HTML5test.com (Which by now isn't relevant anymore: yay for progression) and created WhichBrowser (Which apparently isn't relevant either?).
Niels' talk was titled "The web we I want". In which he "Uses the web beyond the edges of the browser window".
He showed us a few of his projects starting with "Project Bad Clock"
The clock is made out of a few core components; A Raspberry Pi 5, a circular touchscreen, a battery and a small dial.
He didn't just make a boring old clock though, the device had an accelerometer which meant no matter what orientation it was in, the clock face would stay positioned correctly. He also made a classic version with physics and fun interactions.
Something else he did was create a clock using an oscilloscope. I didn't even know what an. oscilloscope was, so heres a description from Wikipedia:
"An oscilloscope is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying voltages of one or more signals as a function of time. Their main purpose is capturing information on electrical signals for debugging, analysis, or characterization."
The main part to note about this device is that it doesn't use a typical modern day display you would see with tablets and phones. It uses a CRT display which uses electron guns to emit electron beams which then display something on the phosphor-coated screen, which generates light when it by electrons. You learn something new every day huh.
As you can imagine, drawing an image on the display of an oscilloscope is pretty complex and nothing like what you'd do using CSS and SVGs.
Anyway, Niels created an oscilloscope emulator in the browser.
And he could even play DOOM on it...
And to finish it all off he did the same thing using a laser projector.
This was an incredibly inspiring talk and right up my alley, motivating me to tinker more and come up with absurd ideas like Niels did.
Conclusion
I had a pretty good time visiting this event. It was nice to go back to my previous school again and the talks were interesting and inspiring. I'll definitely join the next event June 10th.