⇾ Working Draft Podcast: The Web Beyond the Edges of the Browser Window, Niels Leenheer
Niels Leenheer, who gave one of the most talked-about talks at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf this year, joined Schepp and Hans on the Working Draft Podcast for a deep dive into everything he showed on stage.
If you were at the conference, you know what Niels does: he takes the browser somewhere it was never really designed to go. Stubborn clocks on Raspberry Pis with round touchscreens and Box2D gravity simulations. SVG shapes turned into audio waves to draw on a 1980s oscilloscope using Web Audio. DMX-controlled stage lights, smoke machines and – for obvious reasons not brought on stage – a flamethrower, all driven from the browser via WebUSB. A laser projector running Asteroids. And CSS Doom, a full playable version of Doom rendered almost entirely in HTML and CSS, which has already convinced the Ladybird browser team to fix a CSS anchor positioning bug.
The podcast goes much deeper than the talk could. Niels explains the actual code behind the oscilloscope, how the gravity simulation works, why Chrome struggles with 10.000 textured 3D divs, and how newer CSS features like trigonometric functions, custom properties and stepped animations make CSS Doom possible. Oh, and the level exit is not a div. It is a proper button. As it should be.
A genuinely fun listen. This tim in English. It’s for anyone who loves the web and wants to be reminded of what it can do when someone decides to ignore what it’s supposed to be for.