I am excited to be here and really, really excited we get to start the day off and the

conference talking about peer-to-peer protocols because it is something I think is super fascinating

and I have interesting stuff to show off later in my talk.

This talk is called reclaiming the web with peer-to-peer protocols but before I dive in

and tell you what in the world that is all about, I want to introduce myself.

I am Tara Vancil and I am a web developer.

I'm also really, really into anything to do with nails and nail art and I love music,

especially if it is from Beyonce.

If you like nails or Beyonce or both we should definitely talk later on.

I am a web developer but I have spent the last year and a half in a strange role.

Instead of working on a team where my job is to build websites, I have been building

a browser with these two guys.

Pfrazza and mafintosh.

We have experiments we want to run and figure the browser is the best place to do that.

The browser is called Beaker and it is experimental way meaning we are doing experiments in the

science way not that it is buggy.

It actually works.

You can download it.

The cool experience we are running in Beaker is what happens when you put a peer-to-peer

protocol in the browser.

Pretty interesting things happen like being able to publish a website from the browser

and being able to offer experimental peer-to-peer APIs to developers.

I will tell you a lot more about Beaker and show you Beaker later.

Before I do that, I want to spend some time to reflect on what even is the web because

I think it is relevant to your conversation.

-- our.

So, I am asking this to reclaim the web and we should probably talk about who took it

in the first place and what have they done with it.

We are all here in this room at a conference dedicated to the web so surely the web can't

be in too much trouble; right?

I have to agree.

I am extremely optimistic about the future of the web.

I am really pleased with where the web is at right now.

I am really happy to see so many new people still coming to the web every day to learn

how to build things with HTML, and JavaScript, and CSS.

I am pleased to see that the tools we depend on like NPM and WebPack and Babel are improving

to make workflows seamless.

And I am thrilled browsers are working hard to improve the web and compatibility across

browsers.

If you are not optimistic about the web, I might highlight the Chrome Developer summit

happened this weekend.

This is an opportunity for Chrome developers to share ideas and prototypes about how the

web is going to move forward.

They announced cool proposals like virtual scrolling which should help you improve loading

as you scroll down a page and other neat stuff was demoed like Houdini which is an improvement

on how CSS works.

Seeing the neat announcements earlier this week gave me time to reflect on the wins of

the web like CSS grid which if I dare say makes com posing layouts kind of fun or the

fact that Boku has been working hard with the W3C and other browser vendors to build

a huge test sweep for compatibility across the web.

The web is making progress and I think it is important to recognize that and the people

that make it happen because their jobs are not easy.

Also because the web is a miracle of human cooperation if you think about it.

When you take a second to think about what the web is it is a miracle it exists and let

alone that it is improving.

The web is this strange thing where 7 billion people on earth have come together and decided

on a language for how we build digital stuff and get it from one computer to another.

Like, that is absolutely miraculous we pulled that off.

You have a web page and no matter what context you are browsing in, you have a reasonable

expectation it will work consistently.

If you will allow me a moment to be sentimental I just want to say I think that is bad ass.

This is a talk about reclaiming the web, though.

Even though I am really optimistic about the web, I am a little bit worried too.

I am worried about the web isn't perfect and honestly that is OK especially when you think

about how this web is a weird amorphous set of technologies that we have all agreed to

use and that is pretty much the only thing binding it together; our shared agreedness

to use it.

The web is only 28 years old.

The first was built in 1990 by Tim Burners-Lee.

It was only 25 years ago the first mainstream browser was released.

We are operating on a small time scale here.

The web is a baby so you would expect it to have some problems.

The web isn't perfect.

We can accept that but I think the next step is to ask ourselves how are we going to shape

the next 30 years and I mean, we, the people in the room who are web developers and people

who influence standards, we do have say over how the web works.

We know that the web is going to change because there are standards of bodies and browser

vendors and other interested parties who want to shake the web but the question is what

values are why going to choose to uphold in the next 30 years?

What new features are we going to enable?

How do we decide those things?

Oftentimes, I think they are decided by personal experience.

Some of you probably work with e-commerce and you might be paying more attention to

the web payments API.

Or maybe some of you in this room have been the target of a focused-harassment campaign

on social media and you might have an interest in seeing how the web learns from what we

have seen about how humans engage online in the last 28 years.

The web is very, very new and we are still learning so much about how communities work

online and how humans behave.

When I think about what I want to web to look like in 30 years, honestly the community bit

of it is what interests me the most.

Yeah, the graphics and all the cool technical stuff about the web is amazing and it is what

makes the web the web but we come to the web because we want to talk to me.

We want to share interests, make friendships and form communities.

I am extremely interested to ask how can the web platform itself change, however subtly,

the ways we interact with each or online.

Whether you like it or not, this guy right now has a lot of say over how online communities

work.

And I am not sure he knew what he was getting into when he started Facebook but the point

is Facebook is a massive, global online community and we have learned some kind of terrifying

things about humans interacting with each other online.

We are mean, we are nasty, we are reactive, we are just not very good at talking to each

other, are we?

This guy and other folks are in charge of helping us move forward.

I frankly don't think they have stepped up to that responsibility very well.

I want us, as web developers and a web community, to think about what can we do to adjust how

people talk to each other online?

Are there some nobs we can turn in terms of the technical architecture of the web that

can improve the situation?

I don't know but this question motivated me to work on Beaker and it has been the guiding

star in my exploration and the experiments we have been running at Beaker.

So to go back to the question I mentioned earlier, what happens when you put a peer-to-peer

protocol in the browser?

Would that be the right knob to turn to maybe make it a little nicer to communicate with

people online?

I don't know.

I can show you some of the experiments we have done and share some of the things we

have learned in the process.

Before where do that, let's just take a look at HTTP because this is the knob we turn in

Beaker.

The protocol knob.

This is the distillation of how HTTP works.

It is a client server model where one person can upload data to let's say Facebook, Twitter,

WhatsApp.

A person gets the data from the service and there is nothing wrong with that architecture,

but I would like to propose HTP and this client server architecture is a big part of why we

have gotten the way -- a big part of why online communities, massive online communities, have

turned out to be so problematic.

In contrast, this is what a web base on a peer-to-peer protocol looks like.

This is a contrived example but it is a network wherein one individual can connect directly

to another individual.

In this case, we are looking at someone sending a message but we can also think of websites

being transmitted from computer-to-computer and cutting out servers.

Why don't I just show you Beaker because I think it is a lot more exciting to see this

stuff in action.

This is Beaker.

It is a browser.

It is not terribly exciting to look at when you are just looking at the start page but

it works like you would expect a browser to work.

You can browse HTTP websites.

This is the Beaker website and nothing remarkable here.

But if you can see in the top corner there is a tab that says P2P version.

When I like that it will take me to the peer-to-peer version of this website.

There is.

You probably didn't even see that.

The only thing that's different is the protocol.

It says dat and that is the protocol we use in Beaker.

This website doesn't look like anything special.

It is just a bunch of files, CSS, HTML images, links, everything.

It works just the way you would expect a browser to work.

I mentioned that by putting a P2P protocol in the browser we enabled things like publishing

a website from the browser.

I am show that off.

I will go to the top-right menu and click create view and I will create a website using

a pasted template Beaker provides.

Beaker will literally create a new URL for me and populate the website with basic template

files.

I will click it and it will happen fast.

Boom.

We are looking at Beaker's view source tool here.

I will show you more but let me set the title of the website for now.

Then I will open it up.

Here it is.

It is just a website.

It doesn't do anything except let you change the background color.

What is interesting about this is this is a website and I can share the URL with any

of you and you can download the website and files directly from me.

I didn't publish the files on a server anywhere.

I did it all inside the browser.

How do you edit websites?

If we jump back to the view source tool we can look at all the files that compose a website.

Why don't we open index.html and actually edit it.

I will change this to say hello, Seattle.

Hit the save button.

When I refresh I will see the change.

Cool.

I want to show off this neat feature we have which is live view loading.

We put that right into the browser because it is so convenient.

Like a lot of us in this room who are developers, we probably have a preference about writing

code like Sublime or VS code.

This syncs the files to a directory on my computer.

OK.

I am going to open this up in Sublime and open the index.html in Sublime and go back

to this website.

We have live view loading on and I will edit the H1 tag to say hello from Sublime and when

I hit save you will see the updates.

Boom.

There we go.

This is neat but I mentioned earlier that Beaker also has peer-to-peer APIs.

This is really where it gets exciting because static websites are cool and make up a lot

of the web.

They are not every part of the web.

We still need applications where people can have profiles and data linked to their profiles.

Beaker's APIs are the key to making that possible.

I am going to open the dev tools and show you a little bit of how this works.

To start off, we need to get access to the files that compose this website.

I am going to do that using Beaker's datarchive constructor which basically gives you

access to the functions that help you connect to the peer-to-peer network.

We have a variable that we will be able to work with here.

Let's start off with just listing all the files in this website.

You might notice this looks a lot like the Node files API and that was on purpose.

Let's do files.readdir and we will read the top level directory.