Talks and interviews

These are various talks and interviews I’ve given about my work on web browsers and standards.

Igalia Chats: CSS Working Group Face To Face Live!

(given together with other CSS Working Group members)

Part of:
Igalia Chats
Date:
Target audience:
Web developers
Length:
~1 hour (my interview was ~11 minutes)
Link:
https://www.igalia.com/chats/css-ftf-live-2024

As part of the CSS Working Group Face-to-Face meeting that Igalia organized in June 2024, Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer did an episode of Igalia Chats interviewing various CSSWG members, me included.

In it, I am being interviewed by Eric Meyer about my work on line-clamp, why it needs fixing, how it interacts with CSS Working Group discussions, and the implementation in Chromium. My interview starts at timestamp 15:19.

Past and future of server-side runtimes

(given together with Nicolò Ribaudo)

Event:
NodeConf EU 2023
Date:
Target audience:
Server-side JS developers
Length:
~25 minutes
Slides:
https://abotella.pages.igalia.com/past-and-future-of-server-side-runtimes

The history of server-side JavaScript runtimes has seen evolutions and revolutions in a number of aspects: ways of doing I/O, module systems, interoperability across different runtimes, interoperability with the web, and much more.

This talk explores this history, covering past innovations and standardization efforts (did you know that CommonJS was much more than a module system?). We then learn about WinterCG, a new effort to coordinate runtimes to interoperate with the web, and discuss how it can shape the future of server-side JavaScript.

Integrating Task Attribution and AsyncContext

Event:
BlinkOn 18
Date:
Target audience:
Chromium developers, browser developers, web standards engineers
Length:
~30 minutes
Slides:
https://abotella.pages.igalia.com/async-context-integration

AsyncContext is a TC39 proposal that tracks user-provided values across asynchronous continuations (await points), as well as web APIs such as event handlers. The work that’s currently being done in task attribution also tracks browser-internal values across asynchronous continuations and web APIs. It would be better to layer one of these two features on top of the other, in Chromium and in the specifications.

This session aims to discuss this integration, whether the semantics of these two features agree in regards to web APIs, and how they should be layered.

Updates on line-clamp

Event:
BlinkOn 18
Date:
Target audience:
Chromium developers, browser developers, web standards engineers
Length:
Lightning talk (~3 minutes)
Slides:
https://abotella.pages.igalia.com/line-clamp-2023

This lightning talk discusses the updates on line-clamp that happened since the previous edition of BlinkOn, in particular about how the CSS Working Group is working on two separate proposals, and on how I made working implementations in Chromium for both of them.

Specifying line-clamp

Event:
BlinkOn 17
Date:
Target audience:
Chromium developers, browser developers, web standards engineers
Length:
Lightning talk (~3 minutes)
Slides:
https://abotella.pages.igalia.com/blink-on-17-line-clamp

This lightning talk covers the -webkit-line-clamp CSS property, which clamps an element’s text to a number of lines with an ellipsis at the end. It talks about its many shortcomings, and about various proposals under discussion by the CSS Working Group on how to fix them.