Are there any new or upcoming browser APIs you are keeping an eye on?

Portals have caught my eye as an interesting restructuring of the internet:

It seems like we're moving away from an internet which is organized by domain and more toward one which is organized by topic. This is, of course, ideal for Google, who has been leading the effort, which will probably make it pretty controversial.

Personally, I think this change in organization makes sense. But I want to know: What do you think of it?

I've been playing with loading="lazy"

If you enable "lazy loading" in chrome://flags, your DEV browsing experience will be moderately more efficient 😄

Ben Halpern ・ May 9 '19

#webdev #webperf #chrome #html

WebGPU is the working name for a future web standard and JavaScript API for accelerated graphics and compute, aiming to provide "modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities". It is developed in the W3C GPU for the Web Community Group with engineers from Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and others.

Hi, Ben.

Yes, there are two of them:

1. The Payment Request API. For me this is a huge step forward for eCommerce. I had the opportunity of developing most of the checkout on modelorama.com.mx and this API removes a lot of friction for consumers. Support is almost there:
   caniuse.com/#search=payment

2. Intersection observer API. It is already standard and it really helps to make websites faster.

Form associated custom elements. A much needed addition to custom elements spec that make handling form elements easier.

Spec: html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/cus...

Web Share and Web Share Target would be awesome to have across all browsers! That's a major part of the PWA experience that's still missing. On mobile, where share interactions are built into the OS, PWA's obviously missing out. And a nice side benefit is that it would remove the need for annoying site-specific share buttons on every site.

Template Instantiation will provide another piece of the puzzle for web components.

Imagine something like this fake pseudocode without framework or library dependencies

<template id="user-tpl" type="repeat">
  <li>
    <article>
      <h1>{{name}}</h1>
      <img src="{{picture}}" alt="{{alt}}"/>
      <p>{{description}}</p>
    </article>
  </li>
<template>

document.getElementById{"user-tpl")
  .instantiate(users, someUl)

See github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/... for real examples.

Constructable Style Sheets and ShadowRoot#adoptedStyleSheets, as well as something like CSS modules will let us write shadow styles in CSS without a build step.

that last proposal was in danger of stalling, so if you have something productive to add to the discussion, get over there.

Built-in Modules for Javascript! Something that imo that should've come at the same time all in one go with the introduction of script[type=module] but what can you do?

github.com/tc39/proposal-javascrip...

developers.google.com/web/updates/...

Y'know, I thought the MediaRecorder API was pretty new. But Firefox launched it in 2014 and Chrome followed up in 2016. It's very cool though and it didn't stop me writing about it this week though.

I'm also excited that the web is getting a contacts API. This is one of those things that native apps can do and web apps can't, but this time built with the security model of the web (so apps can't just upload all your contacts without you knowing).

Also on the "well, native can do it" front, the native file system API is also going to expand the potential for web applications.