Make the Web Weird Again

The web can be weird. That's what I'm going to talk about today.

First of all, I already got an amazing introduction, but I'll do it myself again. I'm Elian, the lead developer at React Bricks, which is a CMS company, Visual CMS with React Components. It's very cool. I'm also an Astra maintainer. I used to work in the core team for a year. I'm part of BGS, which is a conference organizing group just very much like this one. We do React Brussels, React Paris, and now also React Africa, which is amazing. First conference in Africa. And I am from Belgium. I'm living in Ghent. Do I have fellow Belgians here? One. Hey! Good. Good. I'm already. Love it. Okay. Cool.

If you want to follow me online, I'm quite sure some of you are going to take pictures. Please tag me. I always find it very fun. I'm at Elian Codes on all platforms, just BlueSkiesElian.Codes, which is also my website.

So before I start here, over the past year, I've done a lot of events, a lot of conferences, a lot of meetups, and all of them were about very, very serious topics like accessibility, performance, CSS, whatever, JavaScript. Really cool, really cool, but also very serious. So I thought, like, don't get me wrong. I love giving all of those talks, especially about Astra and everything. I love it. But I thought today I will give you a talk that fits more to my personality, which is cheerful and joy and everything like that, funny. So you're all going to have fun.

That's my goal for today. Have fun! Yeah.

So today I'm here to talk to you about the weird web. Ever since I was a little boy, I was once long ago, I loved weird websites. Does anybody else have that experience? Like I was in school. I was a little kid. I had a computer with internet. I was lucky to be not that old nor that young that I was introduced to that. I loved it.

And I went to this website. Who remembers this one? A lot of you, right? And especially this one. This was my favorite one. If it's loading. Yes. That one. Nobody recognizes it? I'll quickly show it to you. It's called Eelslap. And basically the thing you do is slapping somebody with an eel. So this is just, it's images. But it basically tracks your movement of the mouse. Whoa. Right? Yeah, wow. I didn't build this. But it's pretty cool. I could do this for ages.

And so I was sitting there in my classes not paying attention, but just like doing this. And I got always, the teachers were always very angry with me because I was playing games. But they didn't understand that I loved like the weird web and how this still inspires me to today to make the web more fun. Let me get my slides back up here. So it's up to you.

Like we have the power. We are developers. We can make the web weird. So we might not know everything. So maybe let's just try a couple of weird stuff today so we can actually try stuff and have fun. And I hope you will have fun, I guess. I'm going to have fun.

So first of all, who uses Arc Browser? That's quite a lot of people, right? Yeah. Do you know that it actually injects CSS variables into every website you have? Like these are the ones. Don't mind me like showing my slides. I don't care. It's a little bit easier for me that way. It basically injects CSS color palette in every website.

I have a simple website here, which is just saying the word Arc. And it's black on white. Well, white on black, actually. And it doesn't show any color because those variables aren't there. And I set fallback values for that. But what happens if I go to my Arc and I open that same website? If I open that same website, it's actually green as well. And that's because my color scheme in Arc is green. So if I change that, I think it's somewhere here, edit theme colors. And I want it to be purple, for instance, my website will react to it. So this is a personalization that you can do on the web. Is it really useful? Well, not really, but not everything has to be. If it's fun, that's more than enough for me. But this was just CSS.

And CSS is one thing, but what if we can programmatically, like JavaScript-wise, we can do way more stuff because one program that we all use is the browser and the browser actually has a lot of APIs that we don't know? So let's take a look at some APIs that you might not have heard from. The battery status API, who has heard of it? Yeah, a couple. Who is actively using it? Kind of? No one really is, and that's a good thing. But it's very simple.

It's basically on the navigator, you can just, hey, get me the battery info, and then you can display, you see the levels. You can also check if it's charging or not. But you can actually also attach event handlers to it. You add listeners.

So I'm quickly going to do that. Well, I already prepared the demo, obviously. And it's all in just vanilla JavaScript. I did build this in React at first, but then I was like, maybe I need to show the power of the web more because this is just an HTML file. Well, it's served with Vites, but it's an HTML file with a script, and that script is doing everything. There is no real React or framework going on.

So what do I have? I just have a div with a title, I have a P element, and I have the level. And it basically does what it says. This page will disappear as your battery drains. So you have 100% battery, the page is 100% visible. If you have zero battery, well, your laptop will be out, but the website will also not be there. And it's very simple to do, because I just ask the battery, well, the browser, hey, can I use the battery, please? And there is no permission required to read the battery, by the way. That's pretty strange, in my opinion, but it's how it is.

And then I just add an event listener to the level change. So if I show this visually, I should have that here. So I have the battery. So now it's green. It's green text. I didn't explain what that is. Well, basically, it's my cable here. So if I unplug that cable, it's red. Because it's not charging. Whatever that was. That was not the battery, I hope. The battery died. So this page is now 89% 98% visible.

Thank you, Tejas. And it's very simple, and I'm doing a lot of stupid things with it. Like this is not really useful, right? But it can be useful. It's available across most major browsers, not in Safari. It's actually available in Firefox, but they spoof it with fake data, because they think it's a violation of privacy. And in some ways, I agree.

Is it useful? Yes. In a way. Because imagine you have a lot of GPU work being done on your website. Now you can actually detect, hey, this person's website, well, this person's laptop, isn't that full? Maybe we should tone it down and use less battery. Yeah, wow, exactly. But actually, it also has very dark things. Like for instance, this is a project by a fellow Belgian of mine, Dries de Poorten, and it basically is called Die With Me. So this is a chat app, but you can only use it if your percentage is below 5%. So you can chat with your friends or with people randomly across the world who also have a dying phone. So it's fun, but the thing is, what if we take like a really dark turn?

eBay, whatever, Amazon, and suddenly you can detect, hey, this person only has 10% battery left that should last around maybe 20 minutes. Let's push some sales and let's make the prices a little bit more high, because maybe he still needs to purchase something, but his phone is going to die. Well, that's a very dark turn, but it's totally and technically possible. I hope you all don't do that. Don't use it for that.

What I use it for, for instance, I work at a CMS company. We don't have autosave for that. So I can send a notification, hey, your website is, well, I'm detecting that your battery is almost dead. Maybe you should save.

For instance, WebHID, Web Human Interface Devices. Who has used it? Nobody. Wow. Okay, cool. I'm going to show you some cool shit then. It's very simple. It's just devices, a web navigator, get the HID devices, and then you just get the device and you can interact with that device. And I'll show you some examples. Again, I'm doing stupid shit with it, but I'll explain afterwards if it's actually useful and where it is.

So I have this audio interface here. That's the thing that makes the sound, right? That's my sound interface that I use for sound, but it's also a WebHID device. So I'm just connecting to that one because that was easier. As you can see, I have already a couple of things with me. So Volt 2, that's what it's called. I'm going to connect to it. And now I'm really going to turn the sound off, because if I touch it and it goes off, that's annoying for you all. This WebHID title is actually populated with variables, HSL, which is a CSS way of calculating colors in a big round. But what I can do, I have four buttons on here. And if I touch them, I can actually alter those colors because it's just an event listener on some hardware buttons. I'm using it for stupid shit. Don't do that.

Don't do that. But it's a cool thing on how you can actually do it. So now it's not visible because none of my colors are turned on. Now I turn on the red. I turn on the blue, whatever, all those colors. So is it difficult to do? Not at all. Let me get my code up for you. So WebHID, there we go. There is some annoying thing, and that is you have to read registers because you're interacting with hardware. It's sometimes a little bit more advanced, but luckily these days we have AI to solve that for you. I did it manually and mostly by just pressing the buttons and seeing what works. So I just add an event listener to click, which connects to the device, blah, blah, blah. The device opens. Then I can actually use the input device. And what do I do? I just do an on input something, basically. I get the register number and everything. And how I do that is not really interesting. It's mostly this code, and it's very shitty. But what I can do is that you can see there are equals randomized number, B equals randomized number. So every time I push a button, it's going to return me a random value, and I inject that value into my HSL color. And that code is right here. And it's pretty easy. So basically I just take the style, add the style, and do it all with JavaScript. And then suddenly we have a website that can change colors. Is it useful? Of course it is. Is it useful for the shit I do? No. But definitely it's useful because what if you have 3D on your website or maybe somebody that has accessibility issues? Maybe they can use hardware to interact with the web directly without a keyboard or with something else. For instance, PlayStation controllers. If you've ever done something, yeah, you can connect them to WebHID. Good Tejas.

Tejas knows his stuff. But then WebMIDI. Who knows MIDI in general? OK, good, good. A couple of people. Yeah, there. Cool. OK, nice.

WebMIDI. Well, I'll connect my phone again for this. Quickly. Hoping the Wi-Fi works. OK, I'm quickly going to switch to my hotspot. That's going to be a little bit easier.

So how are you all doing today? Good? Better than my internet, it seems. OK. With a little bit of luck, it should come up now. It doesn't. OK, well, oh, it does right when I need it. OK, perfect. It's very slow, and I don't know why. But I'll do it like this. So this is me. For the people that know me better, this is four, five years ago. I don't know.

The people that know me a little bit better, I am a DJ. They know I love partying. I love Berlin, as well. Good parties. I like them. It's a lot of fun.

So I have hobbies, just like all of you. And in 2022, I started working full-time. And I was spending eight hours a day behind my computer. Well, at least, because I was very active in open source. So, of course, like, well, no, you do way more than eight hours a day because you love it or you hate it, whatever. You still do more.

So I decided to go all in on, well, not necessarily all in, but I used more vinyls because I don't want to be busy with screens and everything. So then I bought a guitar because I was like, hey, it's a lot of fun to be able to play. I didn't know how, but I learned. And you do the thing that every guitar player does. If you can play one guitar, you buy another one. So that's my second guitar. And then I bought a third one and a couple of extra speakers. And then I bought a fourth one, I think. Well, I have a couple. But I wanted more because, well, as awesome as guitars are, it's not really my jam. I'm Belgian, so I'm very much of the techno world.

So I bought a 303, which is like a typical, very acid bass line, techno, mainly, and an RD-6, which is a drum computer. I bought those, and then I was like, hmm, I probably need a groove box. So I bought the groove box, and you can already see like my apartment is kind of transforming. My girlfriend is very much not happy with that, but that's her problem. So then I bought a Keylab, which is a very big keyboard to be able to control them all and keep them in sync.

So long story short, I have to move because my apartment is getting a little bit too small. That happened. But there is no screen. That's what was important to me. There is no screen, there is just one thing. And that's a clock. And the cool thing is that clock is called MIDI, and we can use it in the web browser context, which is pretty crazy. Because when I first read, hey, I can do this via the browser, it didn't make sense.

You need a box like this, by the way. It's not that you can just plug a USB in. And I will show you actually how this is connected so it makes a little bit more sense. I'm just going to see if I can use OBS for that to check if my phone can do that.

What do I want? Can I see my screen? Nope. Doesn't look like it. Well, that's sad for you. You cannot see it. I'll explain it. So how this works, it's basically all of these devices, there is no USB. There is USB ports, but I'm not using them. There is one, and that's in the audio interface. The audio interface is connected via USB-C to my laptop. And basically, it gets two input lines of audio, sound, and that audio sound is going to go to those two speakers.

How that's connected, that's their problem, not mine. And it seemed to work. We tried it before. And I actually have a MIDI cable here, which is connected from this device to this device. And basically, what this will do is it will tell it, like, hey, I'm playing at this much beats per second or per minute BPM. And this one will then react to that one and will know how fast it should play the notes. That's basically all it does. The cool thing is I can connect this up to the internet like this, and I'm going to. First thing I did was add a video. And the video is Mr. Rick. And Mr. Rick, oh, by the way, that's maybe a thing I should have mentioned. I think I have it somewhere here. It works in most browsers. That doesn't matter, blah, blah, blah.

Flashing colors. So if you have some kind of seizure, disease thing, be aware. What happens is I can connect to that clock. And I already am in my browser, well, in the console. But when I press play, I can play a Rick Astley video. So I can control the web just by pressing MIDI buttons.

And how that works, it's actually, well, it's not easy, but it's not that hard as well. It's just a very simple looping video, which has a source, Rick.mp4, whatever, with the ID Rickdance. And what I'm going to do, all of this code is just connecting to the device, making sure you can interact with the device and everything. But basically I can connect here the Rickdance, blah, blah, blah. And I can check what data is coming in.

And in the case of the clock, the clock starts at 250. That's the binary code, whatever. And 250 to stop it. So when I go, you see that I console log there. So what I do is when I press play, you will see that it sends out 250. When I stop, it's going to make it 255. If I stop again, it's going to do the same thing. So very easy. But the interesting thing is what if I am at a disco and I want my own lights. They have pretty good lights, but I can actually bring my own.

So what I did is I hooked up my six channels here, I have six, to HSL again, and I'm going to widen and use that spectrum to create sounds. So if I now... Now I should have sound. Okay, this is just a simple hi-hat. And you can see flashing colors, by the way. I'm making you aware. If I then add another sound in, the colors are changing. You can see the channels. That's a snare.

But we can also use a keyboard. So what if we hook them all up together and actually start to sequence stuff? Your whole webpage can change visually and represent the music you're actually playing. In this case, live. So let me find something here, like a good Belgian bass line.

Okay, okay, not bad, not bad. I can use that. Let me put on a sequencer. And now we suddenly have way more bass. Ah, there we go. And Rick was dancing with us. Thank you, Rick. Thank you, thank you. But maybe... Thank you for the applause. But maybe also let's give the AV team an applause because they made this happen with me. Thank you.

So, is it useful? But it is a lot of fun though. It is a lot of fun. Because all of this is connected and I can connect with basically one USB-C cable and one audio interface. But imagine that you can actually bring that to the web. For instance, Photoshop on the web is a thing now. What if I can press a note and it will actually change the color opacity of some filter? Or you can change your exposure. Something like that. It's way cheaper than an Elgato Stream Deck for instance. But it's pretty cool. And these are just some of the APIs. There is way, way more. And the web is very advanced and we know some things work in Chrome and don't work otherwise. But that's not important. Normally, and especially when I...

Well, it very much relates to my work at Astro. I say use the platform. Like, Astro is very much a platform first thing. It's fun and that's what makes our jobs fun. Because this very much relates to my open source story. Like, open source is awesome and it's fun.

But the problem is that it very much, like we hosted a panel about it, it can very much start to feel like a burden. And the thing is, what I always say, publish your libraries. Let other people have fun with it. Do something, like for instance the eelslap one. It's so simple. Well, it made me smile. It made me happy. Our job is supposed to be fun. We're eight hours a day doing our job. Please let's keep it fun as well. It's very important to me. Keep the web weird.

I'm Elyon. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE The first is, do you find you have a different tolerance for failure when building weird or silly projects? Do you ever give up? And if yes, maybe... All the time. What are some of the projects that failed? Basically, one is these. I just showed them to you and you're finding it fun because it's a conference talk. But if you're at home, nobody's going to use this. And that doesn't matter because I had fun building it and if I then publish it and nobody uses it, that wasn't my expectation. So I don't care that much. But not just in terms of publishing, but in terms of building stuff. Do you ever have ideas and just go, well, that didn't work. Ditch it.

Is that tolerance different? Yeah, totally, because you're having way more fun. And even figuring out if it's going to work is a lot of fun for me. Because I was just playing music and actually I didn't care that much about the whole thing being awesome, looking good or working. I just had fun. Have you had any projects that have just straight up failed out? Not really, actually. Most of the times, I find a way of doing it, even if it's very hacky. But yeah, mostly I find my way.

Lovely. Thank you. Next question. How do you get inspired? The person who submitted said, I feel like I lack creativity. Yeah, it's a hard thing, but I think it typically strikes me whenever I'm not necessarily bored at work, but when you're like sitting there, not having fun, then I'm like, oh, you know what should be fun. And then I start developing that idea and that idea becomes another idea and that becomes another idea. But getting inspired, I mean, it takes a lot of, I don't know, luck. I noticed in your talk you spoke a lot about using the platform and web APIs, even if there isn't great support for it. Is that a tool you use in order to create ideas? It depends.

Because for instance, with Azure, you're not going to publish APIs that nobody uses and that isn't generally well supported. But for fun projects, it doesn't really matter if it doesn't work on my phone. Or maybe it does, but not on that mobile phone. That doesn't matter too much, but in my day-to-day life, yeah, I'm not going to... Well, now I know all of those APIs and I actually use some of them in my work. So I think that's a cool thing. Yeah, and of course you gave the example of the battery in the Cache API, right? I really appreciated that you gave a real-world non-silly example, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, so you did kind of address this slightly in your talk, but it is worth asking again. Even if your ideas are weird, how do you even if weird, how do you feel about things like arcs, color variables, when they aren't supported anywhere else? Yeah, well, first of all, your website should be, well, if it's like a production website, it should be accessible and the same experience everywhere, ideally. But in the case of arc, it's a fun thing, right? It's personalization in a fun way and it's just injecting CSS variables. That's not too bad, but the problem is when, of course, that starts to differ very much across different browsers and there isn't a standard, then it becomes very annoying. But luckily in the case of arc, you can just detect as well, like is it arc or is it something else? In that case, I might just do a fallback normally. I never really, well, I did actually once did my personal website with that, but then I removed it again because I wanted all users to have the same experience and I think that's generally the best way before having fun, exploit the fuck out of it. Push it to its limits.

Alright, a question from Christina here. Will you perform tonight at the afterparty? Daria, am I? No, I don't know. No, I'm not, but you can ask me for next year. The people want to. I hear it. Very nicely done. Alright, so there's a few similar ones. Could you share your SoundCloud? I actually don't have one. What? What do you put under all your viral tweets? Well... Not your SoundCloud it turns out. No, actually I don't really publish music. I think there is only one person here has heard my music and it's Attila. I don't know where he is. But he has heard some of my music and that's it. I don't really publish it because that's not my goal. My goal is to have fun while playing and that's the thing about the no screen thing. I'm not recording anything really. I'm just there in the moment enjoying it and then afterwards I put it back down and I start doing something else. That also reminds me a little bit of a question in the previous talk around like will you open source this work that you've done? Because there's actually a whole bunch more that goes into that and that isn't our goal. The goal is we're using it for us.

Alright, what is the weirdest thing you have built for fun? Honestly, I think this is. Like the WebMidi one is pretty weird. I wanted actually the thing that I wanted to do is to make sure that my whole setup at home that I can connect it with one cable and then can control my whole workflow like approve PRs by pressing buttons or playing a certain tune. That seems like a lot of fun but I haven't got the time to build it yet fully but I have ideas. Have you seen the TikToker I think who's building like a cutting mat with an overlay on top of it and they're calling it Jarvis and they can talk to it and change the size of the stuff. Really? That sounds cool. Super cool. I once built a thing which was ripping apart a Furby and installing Raspberry Pi Zero into it and then getting it to say obscene things. Yeah. There's a lot of fun stuff out there especially like once you start going into the hardware world like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and everything.

You can do a lot. Yeah, absolutely. Alright. We've got time for a couple more questions and we've got more than we can ask. This question, I'm not sure how relevant it is and I feel like you might be biased but is Astro the best way to build anything on the web? It depends on what you're building of course but generally if I build a website I'll go with Astro. Yeah. If I was you too to be honest.

Alright, so this is a question about one of the APIs you spoke about. How is Web HID different from Web Bluetooth? They both wirelessly connect to external devices. No, Web HID is wired. Oh is it? Yeah, it works over USB basically and Web HID as I believe it is just better and generally more supported but Bluetooth is old and unreliable and hard to do whereas Web HID is actually quite easy like as in the APIs. What's the support like for Web HID in terms of hardware? Is it common or do you have to seek it out? No, it depends. It's getting more and more common especially Playstation controllers already have it. Xbox doesn't. It's coming more and more but the problem still is that it's not generally supported in all browsers so why would they support it in all devices?

Alright, last question which I really like actually from Christos here. What is the weirdest native API you've used at work so far? Not for fun home projects. At work I'm not allowed to. No, I'm kidding. I can but yeah I think the battery API is I found out that way but generally I don't use that much weird APIs actually at work since it's a CMS so you kind of have to make sure it works otherwise I'll have complaints. Now it's time to make it weird. Alright, join me in giving Elliot a huge round of applause for the last talk of the day. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.