What’s Next in jQuery and JavaScript?

Posted: May 7th, 2008

27 Comments (Show Comments)

1. Paul Goscicki (May 7, 2008 at 9:00 am)

   Download link results in a 404.

2. Paul Goscicki (May 7, 2008 at 9:01 am)

   Uhm, actually it seems I need to be logged in to download.

3. Scott T. (May 7, 2008 at 9:20 am)

   Suggestions:
   * Too dark! Get some bright lights.
   * Green screen the slides and stitch them in later

   Decent pace for a live talk. Might be better if it was a little more ADD for the web, though doing that and maintaining clarity takes practice and work (see the infamous Lessig & sxipper pressies). Overall, I’m not sure a video is the best way to convey bullets/roadmaps like this but I guess different strokes …

4. John Resig (May 7, 2008 at 9:30 am)

   @Scott: Kind of hard to make it brighter without washing out the screen. I’m a little confused by your “green screen” request – were the slides unreadable? They were definitely fuzzy – but nothing that a better (non-iSight-in-Macbook) camera can’t fix.

   I was in a tricky situation since I kind of “had to” give this talk by video for the Ajaxian folks. In the future, I would definitely want to demonstrate things, show live examples, etc. – stuff that couldn’t easily be done via a static page.

5. alsanan (May 7, 2008 at 10:02 am)

   Hi. I don’t know about the rest of your readers, but I’m not english-native so I can read and write in pretty good english, but I’m bad talking and understanding english talks. I like the idea of videos but if some text is attached to the post I think it’s even better.

6. Andrew Herron (May 7, 2008 at 10:12 am)

   Great news about jQuery and its upcoming changes; it’s one of the reasons we’ve made it our primary library here at work.

   The one thing I take issue with the need for standardized audio and video codecs. Who would decide this and then why would you want to force the world to live with that decision? What might be a good codec now may not be in 6 months or a year and while some browsers are quick to push these kinds of updates, others are quite lacking. Of course, if we had a promising open source option for both (though we do have ogg for audio and Adobe is apparently opening Flash) then I’d be all for it. Tying the hands of developers to a single ‘standard’ codec would seem to stifle innovation and would only move to alienate others.

   I think the better solution would be to create a standard for specifying the codec you’re going to use. I agree that right now users can have very different experiences from what the developer intended, but this appears to be more of a fault of the plugin developers and the browser’s implementation.

   I think the real meat of this argument lies in the UI that is used to control the video. The codec itself should have no bearing on that and think a stronger push to open up the API for these controls should be pursued.

7. Tim (May 7, 2008 at 10:13 am)

   SCNR: http://www.idlewords.com/audio-manifesto.txt

8. Phil Palmieri (May 7, 2008 at 10:24 am)

   Is this done in your new home office you posted a while ago?

   So if your using vimeo can you put up an HD version? If you need an HD camera i will be first in line to chip in some cash to get you one if you are going to keep doing these.

   Phil

9. Mathieu Dumais-Savard (May 7, 2008 at 10:32 am)

   Woot, I’ll finally have my jquery t-shirt :P

   John, don’t worry about your speak quality, you’re an amazing speaker. Not only are you passionate and knowledgeable but your English is perfect. (Not like the vast majority of my CS lecturer at ConU Canada).

   Keep up the amazing work!

10. John Resig (May 7, 2008 at 10:52 am)

    @alsanan: That’s a really good point – I’ll see what I can do, in the future!

    @Andrew: I’m not really talking about binding a developer to a single codec – just asking the browser vendors to provide at least one codec to support. Not having to worry about if Quicktime is installed – or some other player – would be immensely useful to developers.

    @Tim: I definitely agree. In the future I want to strive for videos that wouldn’t have been possible with a regular blog post. This was just a try run, of sorts.

    @Phil: Yep – this is my office! I’d absolutely like to do an HD version. I’ll have to research this a little bit more, I think, but it seems like there exist HD web cams now – which is a good start.

    @Mathieu: Thanks! I’m literally sending the latest t-shirt design off to the producers, as we speak.

11. Andrew Herron (May 7, 2008 at 11:00 am)

    @John: Even still, how would you effectively pick the codec? That’s a lot of show for a particular company to have their codec used in all browsers… I really don’t even want to think about the anti-trust litigation that could come from it.

12. engtech (May 7, 2008 at 11:05 am)

    Instead of showing the slides on the wall, just video tape yourself talking.

    Then put the slides in with post-process video editing.

13. Phil Palmieri (May 7, 2008 at 11:21 am)

    @John: Will that work with OSX only has Win logo?
    Aim Hi – or at least mid-range. What you are doing is a huge benefit to all. We bought a $200 1080i handheld camcorder that records to .mov natively. I think the videos are an awesome addition to both jQuery and Javascript. The one you linked to only does 960×720.. Vimeo HD takes full 1280×720 — not that much of a difference though.

14. Buck Wilson (May 7, 2008 at 12:48 pm)

    Thanks for the video, John! I don’t care much about the video quality– if you spend to much work on the video itself, the overhead will convince you to put your effort in other places :)

    Videos are a great way to deliver information like this, and I hope to see more sites do presentations and screencasts in the future.

    Thanks again!

15. Yehuda Katz (May 7, 2008 at 1:04 pm)

    @Andrew you pick a free and open codec like OGG. Unfortunately, the big boys like MS are afraid of related patent litigation (patent trolls might literally be waiting in the wings for everyone to adopt OGG and then come in and sue everyone with deep pockets).

16. Tzury Bar Yochay (May 7, 2008 at 1:18 pm)

    you are a javascript novelist.

17. sky (May 7, 2008 at 1:34 pm)

    Name names! On your ‘What to fix’ slide you mention places where the browsers have implemented with inspiration from the JS libraries (presumably for good). What are they implementing/standardizing that disregards those precedents?

18. Andrew Herron (May 7, 2008 at 2:03 pm)

    @Yahuda: I agree, that’s why you can suggest something like OGG, or the impending open Flash, but MS and the like know what it’s like to get burned for similar practices. I highly doubt they’re going to allow something like a standard audio or video codec. I guess my biggest point is to not start a browser A/V codec standardization process since it’s unlikely to happen. I’d think resources could be better spent trying to convince codec/plugin providers to simply allow for a more open control API.

    I see John’s point of alleviating the worry from a developers shoulders, I just don’t think its feasible and in the end could wind up being more troublesome. By saying that a specific codec is the standard means that it will be very difficult for other, and probably better, codecs to get into the browsers.

19. Bram (May 7, 2008 at 4:38 pm)

    It seems like the video format doesn’t add much value to the viewer but adds the cost of having to keep the same pace as the presenter. I think would have gotten almost the same information from the slides and I think I would have gotten it faster (as your write-ups have been pretty good).

    However I do appreciate this as a first attempt and I look forward to videos that have an added value like some more background information, discussion or actual demos (although for a demo a narrated screencasts might suffice).

    I can’t think of anything negative about the content to complete this critical post because all looks great (especially for jQuery) :-)

20. Marc Diethelm (May 7, 2008 at 7:40 pm)

    Volunteering as a t-shirt beta tester!

    WRT the codec issue I’m not optimistic. The major players are afraid of pushing an existing one because of possible legal implications (sub-marine patents) but also – IMO – because that might be the beginning of a ‘codec war’. The codec wars may however be inevitable anyway. There’s just to much economics in that equation.

    I wonder: maybe the web needs an open initiative similar to and inspired by Mozilla – to build alternative, cutting-edge codecs that work on all platforms?

    Now, can’t wait for UI 1.5 and Enchant! jQuery really bridges the divide between browsers that we’ve been suffering from for many years. It may well play a crucial role in this new chapter of the web…

    Video quality is irrelevant, your JS-fu is really good.

21. William Ukoh (May 8, 2008 at 5:27 am)

    http://ejohn.org/files/ajaxian-next.mov doesn’t appear to be valid!

22. ^love *encounter ~flow (May 8, 2008 at 6:21 am)

    john, thanks first for your wonderful jQuery library, which has made things possible not thought to be that much possible before. given the state of the web, i think this is a lot. i am applying many of your ideas to a generic structure-handling framework (http://code.google.com/p/shuttlepod, alpha, move on, nothing to see), and i hope to include a small subset of jQuery-like selectors soon.

    please don’t worry about your talking presentation, you’re doing well. however, i believe setting more spotlights could help people to navigate with you. just bring along a little more expressiveness. ah, and english subtitles would be terriffic. you’d widen your audience by orders of magnitudes. cheers.

23. Kilian Valkhof (May 8, 2008 at 6:33 am)

    Interesting talk, John! You can sign me up for one of the shirts as well :)

24. Justin Thorp (May 8, 2008 at 8:02 am)

    Love that you’re doing video. So smart!!!

25. Cloudream (May 8, 2008 at 9:11 am)

    Happy birthday :)

26. geebers (May 8, 2008 at 4:02 pm)

    John, thanks for jQuery. It was jQuery that introduced me to javascript programming. Actually my first exposure to object-oriented programming. I’m having a lot of fun using it and actually starting to make some real $$$ from it. Gotta get me one of those t-shirts real soon too!

27. Kevin Le (May 8, 2008 at 6:08 pm)

    John,

    Why vimeo and not youtube?

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