John Allsopp on the Forces Reshaping the Web (And Your Job)
Jump to:
Today, we're chatting to John Allsopp — a developer, author, and co-founder of the long-running Web Directions conference series. He’s been advocating for web standards, better tools, and a more thoughtful approach to building for the web since the early 2000s. From publishing one of the earliest books on microformats to writing the influential Dao of Web Design, John has played a big role in shaping how many of us think about the web. Today, he continues to write, build, and push conversations forward with a focus on browser capabilities, front-end architecture, and the future of developer experience.
You've worn so many hats over the years — developer, author, event organiser. For those meeting you for the first time, how would you describe your career journey in a quick elevator-pitch kind of way?
It's gone backwards in a strange way, a bit like Benjamin Button. I started as a software engineer who built a product that in the early to mid-90s we decided to sell via the web. That led me to realising there were all kinds of needs for tools and training in web development. CSS had just come out, and I found it very powerful, so I built CSS developer tools and all kinds of online training. In time that morphed into in-person training, then a conference, and ultimately 20+ years of conferences for web designers, developers, and others broadly in the field. More recently, I've built a streaming platform called Conffab, where we live stream and make available on demand our conferences and an increasing number of partner conferences as well.
Was there a piece of advice early in your career that completely changed how you worked?
Less advice and more the realisation that I really wasn't cut out to work for other people, which set me on a long, largely impoverishing but very rewarding journey.
You were an early advocate for web standards - what motivated you to champion them before they were widely accepted?
Something about the mission of the Web embodied in the "world wide" part of its name, its focus on accessibility and what we later came to widely call equity and inclusion, just really struck a chord with me and the values that have been important to me for almost all my life.
Back in 2000, you wrote The Dao of Web Design, which has influenced a lot of developers over the years. If you were rewriting it today, what parts would you update or challenge?
I revisited it for CSS Day earlier this year, and if anything, I'd make it broader. I'd take it beyond simply web design to the web more broadly—not just how we do things but what we do. Trying to get people to embody those Daoist principles in the work that they do. I think that aligns quite strongly with that mission of the web I mentioned just before.
That essay influenced an entire generation of developers. What's a piece of writing (your own or someone else's) that's stayed with you?
Perhaps the most influential work for me is The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson, which tells the story of the Industrial Revolution not from the perspective of capital but of labour. One reason it's had such an impact is because it investigates a period of time that I might have thought I understood very well and helped me see it in a very different light.
What's a topic you think deserves its own "Dao of…" essay in 2026?
I'd really like to find the time to write something called "The Dao of the Web." That idea I referred to a moment ago of how simply focusing on web design in that original essay was probably too limiting—but Daoist principles can apply across a broad swathe of human endeavour. There's great wisdom in the central, seemingly quite simple idea of the Dao De Jing.
What inspired you to start Web Directions, and what kept you energised to keep running events 20+ years?
Like many things, it was a happy accident. There's a through line in most if not all of what I've done on the web over the 30+ years I've been involved with it. It has to do with education and enabling people to be better at what they do. Sometimes that's through tools, but mostly it's been through writing and courses and tutorials, and then increasingly amplifying other people's voices to help our audience keep improving.
What's most kept me energised is the impact we see on people's lives and careers. Whether it's someone who takes their first speaking step at our conference and goes on to speak at others around the world—we've had quite a number of speakers like that. It might be people who come to our conferences very early in their career and talk about the inspiration it gave them, and return year after year. It might be seeing people connect through our events. Perhaps they start a company together, or even a life together—that's happened as well. It's that hopefully positive impact on people's lives and careers that has kept me going.
Is there a moment from a conference — a talk, a hallway chat, a surprise insight — that's stuck with you?
At our very first conference, Dave Greiner—who hadn't even started Campaign Monitor at the time and must have been very young—came up to me full of enthusiasm and said words to the effect that it was so great getting together people in the industry, that it was really exciting him, and then mentioned they were hiring. Years later, I used to joke with him that I should have just taken that job instead of spending all that time running our conferences. But that one, right from the very beginning, has stayed with me among many others.
Over the decades of running events, what's one shift in the community that you didn't see coming?
There are a couple of perspectives here.
One is very pragmatic: increasingly, we abstract away the power of the web platform. CSS, JavaScript, the browser APIs have become incredibly capable. Yet as an industry we've optimised around frameworks and libraries, particularly React and its ecosystem. I think it's really stopped us exploring what the web is capable of.
The other is the slow but largely completed transition from a community to an industry—or perhaps a profession, or set of professions.
When people first started coming to our conferences, they were very likely to be the only person, or one of a handful, at their organisation involved with the web. They likely did everything from writing code to optimising images to even writing copy and certainly doing aspects of design.
Twenty-plus years later, I don't think it makes sense to speak of the people who come to events as a community anymore. It's a profession. There are real benefits to that and there are also some drawbacks. People often talk about "the community" but I don't think it's anything like what it was twenty years ago.
If you could bring back one long-forgotten web community vibe from the early 2000s, what would it be?
I might be a bit of a downer, but I think those days are gone. It has to do with what I've just talked about—the move from a community to a profession. Many of the rituals of community still exist, but they're increasingly hollow. Partly because they're often exploited by companies who talk about "giving back" but in reality treat meetups and other community aspects more as resources to be mined for employees or customers rather than genuinely participating in and contributing to that actual community. It was already on the wane in the late teens, but COVID really did knock it about.
What's a technology or tool you secretly miss?
Well, I don't miss it because I still use it, but I think RSS is something incredibly valuable and powerful that is overlooked. Many people don't even know about it, particularly developers.
You've written about the "collapse of the front-end stack." What should developers take from this shift, and does it change whether specialising in front-end or back-end still makes sense?
I think there's a broader lesson for software engineers, whether front-end, full-stack, or back-end: a lot of what we used to do was write code. Increasingly, I think developers will write less and less of it.
Why will this have a particular impact on the front-end? Because we've built a very tall stack of abstractions, for all kinds of reasons, focused on what we call developer experience. With the emergence of large language models that can do a very good job of writing a lot of the code we traditionally wrote, my argument is that much of that stack is no longer relevant. Much of what separates our front-end code from the underlying CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and browser APIs—we no longer need that.
I don't think there's that same death of abstraction in other areas, for all kinds of interesting reasons, but I think the transformation will still occur. Whether you write Python or Go or C# or whatever language you work in, increasingly you won't be writing the actual code, and I think that will have longer-term implications that aren't immediately obvious. But that trend is effectively already well underway.
You've been tracking emerging browser capabilities for years. What's landing now that you think is hugely underrated?
Two capabilities that go hand-in-hand and should have a profound impact on how we architect web applications: view transitions and speculation rules.
Over the last 15 years or so, we've moved very much to a single-page application architecture. The motivation, in part what I've called "app envy," was really about the architecture of traditional multi-page web applications. Every state, every screen, was its own individual web page, and when we moved from one state to the next, we had the latency and time of going to the server, loading the next page, and putting it on the screen. In an age of native apps with slick animations between states, that felt antiquated. So we developed the single-page application architecture and built an entire tool stack around it.
With view transitions and speculation rules, we largely don't need to do that anymore in most use cases. We just don't need the complexity and cost of a single-page application architecture.
Speculation rules are a way for browsers—and for us as developers to work with browsers—to suggest what assets might be pre-loaded. When a user clicks a button or wants to go to a new page, it can load almost instantaneously because the browser has quietly downloaded the assets needed to display that page.
View transitions are a way of animating, often with sophisticated animations, between the current page and a new page when it loads.
Those two together should make you ask: do we need the complexity and cost of a single-page application architecture? In most cases, I think the answer is no.
You've said that AI has been "the next big thing" for a very long time. What feels actually new in this wave?
In a lot of use cases, it just works now. Not in the obvious ways, like chatbots for customer service, or the things that might be immediately apparent, but in very deep ways that will have profound economic impacts.
A clearly obvious example is software engineering—coding agents, code generators. That works incredibly well, not perfectly, and I think is incredibly empowering to developers who work with these technologies in the right way. But there are a whole lot of other use cases where this is already very valuable.
When it comes to the social impact of automation, what do you think we're still not talking enough about?
Ted Chiang, the wonderful science fiction writer whose story "The Story of Your Life" is the foundation for the film Arrival, has made the observation that our fears of AI are fears of capitalism. I think that's a very astute observation.
Imagine in 1900 I said to you: a century from now we will invent a technology which will largely mean humans won't have to work. That would have been greeted as perhaps the greatest achievement in human history. Yet we approach it with fear—not because not working is bad in itself, but because not working means we no longer have a place in a capitalist market economy and we are considered useless by the overarching structure we've created for ourselves as a civilisation.
We're very much not talking about what happens when a lot of the work people have been doing for the last 80 years, in an increasingly corporatist world, is no longer required of humans to do.
From the talks, conversations, and writing you've done this year — what felt most defining about 2025?
In terms of what I've done, I think the Stack Collapse piece will be. If what I write about there comes to pass, it will be a significant transformation.
How should teams prepare for what's coming in 2026 — technically or culturally?
That's a really hard one, because I think the consequences of what's happening right now will mean that the seemingly continuous narrative since the Second World War—of increasing automation and productivity within the framework of increasingly larger corporations motivated by shareholder value—might just stop making sense.
Individuals and teams are in many cases essentially fungible cogs in a very large wheel. Think of a large corporation as essentially a factory in which very few people are truly irreplaceable.
In the short term, I'm thinking particularly about teams who make things: developers, designers, product people. Develop your intuitions with the models you're working with, the AI-enabled tools you're working with.
A bigger transformation, I think, is that it will make less sense to be a cog in a wheel anymore. People will need to think more about autonomy and responsibility. Small teams—Shawn Wang has coined the term "tiny teams"—will have profound impacts. Whether they can even do that within a corporate structure isn't yet clear. We've seen many attempts to create a startup within a large enterprise that never work, for all kinds of reasons.
So will tiny teams work within large corporations? I'm not sure.
And finally, in light of this recent article you wrote, what makes you optimistic about the future of the web?
I have to be honest: I've spoken publicly about this and I'm actually quite pessimistic at a time when I feel I should be optimistic. I wrote a whole article about it just the other week.
Why should I be optimistic? Because the capability of the browser as a platform is amazing and only improving. One real drawback has been Apple's refusal to allow browser innovation on iOS, which means the mobile web has been unable to compete with native applications. Look at the web on desktop—people spend their lives in the browser. SaaS is an entire category of software that exists in the browser. The only reason that hasn't happened on mobile is Apple's chokehold on the platform. But regulators around the world—the European Union, UK, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere—are increasingly turning their attention to this. If we had genuine browser competition on iOS, I believe we'd see a flourishing of the mobile web and the web as a whole.
Why am I not so optimistic? Because I think we've reached what I've termed a local maximum of developing for the web, largely constrained by whatever framework you and your team and your organisation have chosen. You work with React and you effectively become a React developer, unable to take advantage of the deeper capabilities of the web platform. A simple example: view transitions, years after you could start working with them, are still only experimentally supported in the most recent versions of React. That's just one of countless examples.
We're in a very strange time. In my entire 40-plus year experience of working with computers, I don't think there's been a moment quite like this. The possibilities of large language models, when used well, are extraordinary. I think they will have a very significant impact on our economy, our culture, and many roles. Whether we navigate that well remains to be seen.
More broadly, what I am more optimistic about are the impacts of large language models on the production of software. I think the economic impact will be very significant, and while I can make no predictions whatsoever about how things will turn out over the next five to ten years or even next few months, I think we may see a flourishing of new ways of working with computers. I'm certainly optimistic that we might.
John Aslopp and team are bringing the world-leading AI Engineer Conference to Melbourne this June, along with a brand-new event: ai × design, co-produced with UX Australia, diving into how AI is reshaping design practice. Both are part of AI Week (June 1-7)— a full week of events, meetups, and collabs across the city. Mark your calendar!
More interviews you might be interested in:
