Revision 712: The Web Beyond the Edges of the Browser Window, with Niels Leenheer

About this episode

The episode features an interview with Niels Leenheer discussing playful browser experiments and creative web projects.

We speak with Niels Leenheer about playful browser experiments, strange hardware, and why the web is still a great runtime for doing things it was never really designed for. After a short recap of beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf and Niels’ earlier appearances in Revision 273 and Revision 358, we dig into clocks, oscilloscopes, DMX lights, lasers, Doom, and a lot of CSS. SHOWNOTES [00:03:08] HTML5 TEST AND OLD BROWSER API EXPERIMENTS Niels introduces himself as a Dutch web developer who has been playing with the web since 1993. We talk about HTML5 Test, a project that once gamified browser support for new HTML5 features and even influenced browser vendors to implement APIs they had not originally prioritized. Today the test is mostly obsolete, but that is also because HTML5 succeeded. [00:07:42] BEYOND TELLERRAND AND CREATIVE WEB WORK We recap beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf, where Niels gave a talk about his browser-based tinkering projects. The conversation also touches on the current AI-heavy mood in the industry, Oliver Reichenstein’s perspective on AI copycats, and why conferences like beyond tellerrand are valuable because they show creative, non-mainstream work that does not feel…

People in this episode

Hosts: Vanessa Otto, Peter Kröner, Hans Christian Reinl, Stefan Baumgartner, Christian »Schepp« Schaefer

Guest: Niels Leenheer

Topics covered

• browser experiments
• hardware
• HTML5
• creative web work
• AI
• clocks
• CSS

Keywords

• browser
• experiments
• HTML5
• AI
• clocks
• Raspberry Pi
• CSS
• beyond tellerrand
• Doom

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: HTML5 Test, beyond tellerrand, AI, Oliver Reichenstein

Products: Raspberry Pi

Books & works: Doom

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