Blog

In 2019, Bocoup, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Samsung, and W3C together conducted a survey for web developers called MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment. A key finding from that survey was that browsers behaving differently or not supporting the same features was among the top frustrations for web developers. The next year there was a follow-up Browser […]

Many people in the web development community, including many of us at Bocoup, were drawn to the web because it appears to be a diverse and inclusive technology platform. But, when we look around the room at who is working on web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it is mostly a narrow group of […]

Next week is TPAC in Fukuoka, Japan. This is an annual conference for all working groups in the W3C to meet face-to-face. Naturally, there is a desire to have a record of what is said in these meetings. This is done by people in the meeting taking turns to scribe. Even if you have attended […]

Today we’re launching Test262 Report to provide JavaScript developers with up-to-date information on the state of new and existing language features across implementations. Test262 Report is based on daily runs of Test262, the ECMA-262 (“ECMAScript” or “JavaScript”) test suite, in nightly builds of JavaScript engines, and visualizes at-a-glance status of feature implementation progress. Taking a […]

It’s been more than an year since I started attending TC39 meetings, and this most recent meeting felt much like the first, as I faced a new personal challenge: I went there as the acting chair. TC39 is a group of almost 50 highly skilled professionals, each with very strong positions on the existing form […]

Illustration by Sue Lockwood At Bocoup, we hold strong convictions about the social significance of the web platform. We want to see it expand, and we want to make sure that it remains open in all senses as it grows. Following the lead of Philippe Le Hegaret of the W3C (and in collaborations with the […]

Illustration courtesy Matt McLaughlin. It is 9:18 AM on August 21, 2021. You have just finished eating your space-breakfast, and you’re ready to get back to work maintaining the web presence for Omni Consumer Products. After about an hour, you find your latest change fails an acceptance test. It turns out to be a bug […]

To me, the JavaScript language is as beautiful and unexpectedly wondrous as a mini donkey. If I could propose a new cover for the book Beautiful JavaScript, I would choose this one: The reason I find JavaScript beautiful is that there’s something new to learn everyday. For example, recently I learned some surprising facts about […]

Illustration by Sue Lockwood Participating in the creation of a new standard means joining listservs that look like they were put together circa 1850 and asynchronous arguments in IRC channels that span any/all timezones. It means devoting your nights and weekends to learning how to tinker with specs and fighting with professional web standards reps. […]

They tried to cover this up. In designing ECMAScript 2015 (a.k.a. ES6, a.k.a. ES2015), the authors identified a number of undesirable side effects of their work. “Why worry?” they asked. “People will be so smitten with arrow functions and block-scope bindings that they won’t care about a few measly backwards-breaking changes.” Well I care, and […]