Richard MacManus

Prominent Apple blogger John Gruber kicked off a firestorm on Twitter when he suggested recently that web developers “should not be trying to create a ‘native like app’ in a web browser.” Gruber said this in relation to increasing criticism of Apple for not allowing competing browser engines on its iOS platform. By forcing browser … Read more

Decoupled architectures have become a defining trend of this era of web development. We’ve seen it most noticeably with the rise of the Jamstack architecture, exemplified by companies like Netlify and Gatsby. But it’s also been a key theme in the large ecosystem of websites built using the open source WordPress content management system (CMS). … Read more

Last week Automattic, the company behind WordPress, continued its recent run of acquisitions by snapping up a React framework company called Frontity. While the acquisition itself was primarily an “acquihire”, since Frontity’s technology is open source, it also revealed something about Automattic’s plans for WordPress going forward. It’s clear that Automattic now sees WordPress as … Read more

Last week I looked at potential developer platforms for the metaverse, a 3D version of the web that has been much discussed this year. Although Facebook ignited the latest round of hype about the metaverse last month, another company, Nvidia, is much further along in its development of an actual metaverse platform. Nvidia’s Omniverse has … Read more

Last month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the metaverse, a 3D version of the web, in an interview with The Verge. We’ve had a flurry of metaverse news from other tech companies this year — everything from Microsoft’s “enterprise metaverse” to Nvidia’s “metaverse for engineers.” So the metaverse is the latest catchphrase … Read more

We’re about to transition from the cloud computing era to the “sky computing” era, according to a pair of distinguished computer science professors at University of California Berkeley, Ion Stoica and Scott Shenker. As the name suggests, sky computing is a layer above cloud platforms — and its goal is to enable interoperability between clouds. … Read more

One of the most interesting internet trends of 2021 is the experimentation going on with decentralized technologies. We’re seeing a blossoming of open source, decentralized internet applications — many of them attempting to provide alternatives to big tech products. Privacy breaches, misinformation, black box algorithms, lack of user control — these are just some of … Read more

Aether is one of many new applications in the decentralized social media ecosystem. It’s like a peer-to-peer version of Reddit, with similar news aggregation and community discussion features. Interestingly, Aether is not only decentralizing the technical aspects of its product, but the user governance too. In other words, the users of Aether get to govern … Read more

When Twitter began imposing limits on its API for third-party developers in 2010, it sent a strong signal to developers that centralized platforms weren’t to be trusted. That same year, Diaspora — a kind of decentralized Facebook — was founded by four New York students. Later, in 2017, a federated social network named Mastodon experienced … Read more

The decentralized web has been a promising technology for many years now — and I’m not talking about cryptocurrencies. If anything, the hype and financial speculation around cryptocurrencies has distracted from the very real technical progress being made in decentralization. It’s even starting to be baked into web standards, as we shall explore in this … Read more

Those of you old enough to remember the web in the late 1990s will recall the nightmare experiences of coding in CSS (cascading style sheets) during that time, largely because of browser incompatibilities. But we’ve come a long way since then. As CSS pioneer Eric Meyer put it in a recent blog post, the web … Read more

One never knows what to expect in regards to web initiatives from Apple. While the company is a member of the WHATWG group that nowadays steers HTML and other web standards (the other founding members are Google, Mozilla and Microsoft), Apple is famously protective of what it allows on its devices in terms of web … Read more

“Collaborative applications” was one of the new buzzwords to come out of Microsoft Build, the company’s recent annual developer conference. The phrase was bandied about in reference to an application platform for Teams and Office, which gives third-party developers increased access to Microsoft’s core enterprise software products. Developers can both integrate their existing apps into … Read more

After Google I/O earlier this month, I sat down (virtually) with two of Google’s web platform leaders, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith. Our conversation focused on how the web has continued to evolve into a full-fledged platform — even, in some cases, starting to challenge native mobile applications in capability. “The web has become a … Read more

Earlier this month, Google announced it was updating the way Google Docs renders documents — from the traditional HTML DOM-based approach (Document Object Model) to using a web standard called Canvas. The <canvas> element is typically used to draw graphics on a webpage, via JavaScript. So in a sense, what Google Docs will be doing … Read more