Andrew Betts

If you work for a company with more than a few hundred employees, there will probably be some standardised process or system that you’re expected to use, is widely reviled, and yet never improves. Often it’s a design system, template, hosting platform or scheduling tool. Why is it so hard to make these things work well?

AMP continues to be a large part of the way people view web content on mobile devices. Following AMP Letter, what we’ve seen from Google is largely nice sentiments accompanied by business as usual, and the web ecosystem is suffering for it.

For the last two years, I have been serving on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, which is responsible for stewardship of the architecture of the World Wide Web. I’d like to be re-elected to that position, and you can help!

Between 2013 and 2015, I organised and ran five iterations of a developer conference called Edge conf. It was my attempt to fix some of the things I felt were wrong with the way conferences worked.

Google has made much of their Accelerated Mobile Pages project as a solution to bloated websites and frustrated users. But could AMP actually be bad news for the web, bad news for news, and part of a trend of news distribution that is bad for society in general?

Web browsers are now more consistent and evergreen than ever before. Or are they?

In April 2017 I’ll be leaving the FT and joining Fastly. I’ve had a wonderful time at the pink’un, made some lifelong friends and become a devout believer in the importance of independent, trustworthy and well informed journalism to a fair and democratic society. But it’s time to try something new.

Serviceworker step by step, CSS containment, credentials and payment APIs, animation techniques, devtools improvements… Google I/O dropped so much web content this year I took a full month to catch up with even a fraction of it. If anything this shows just how fast the web is flying today. I put together some highlights.

At Google I/O the Washington Post launched a new so-called Progressive Web App. It can be hard to see how the word ‘progressive’ can be justified by some of the many things that now lay claim to that term.

Ad blocking is going mainstream, and this is not a good thing. Inflated, intrusive ads result from advertisers having bad incentives, and ad blocking technology can actually make those incentives even worse. The only solution is one that advertisers can be on board with as well.

In July last year the FT was acquired by Nikkei, the largest business news publisher in Japan. Several FT employees are temporarily relocating to Tokyo to share some knowledge with our new Japanese colleagues, and I’m extremely excited to be one of them.

Search engines created "first click free" to demand a good experience for their users, but for lots of reasons, first click free sucks. Here’s a better solution.

Today I am incredibly proud to be the newest member of the TAG.

The desire among those who like the web for it to do everything native apps can do has recently led to the idea of "progressive apps", but I’m not convinced this does anything except further overload two terms that are already dangerously ambiguous.

Over Christmas, I volunteered for Crisis at Christmas, a massive charity operation to feed and house homeless people in London over the Christmas period. It prompted predictably mixed feelings of guilt and pride, shame and satisfaction.

One of the key benefits ascribed to progressive enhancement is that your site works for everyone. That is almost true. But we need to be clear what we mean by “everyone”.