Interop 2023 CMS Checkin

All the big players in the browser-makin’ world have announced their 2023 Interop project, following in 2022’s footsteps. One of the best things they all could be doing? Absolutely. Without concerted efforts like this, we risk falling back into an era where we can’t count on web technology to work the same across browsers (despite working from standards), and soon we’ll be living in mud puddles and communicating only with grunts.

I have little to say about the project itself, other than :clap-clap-clap: keep going. But this is a fun opportunity to gaze at the marvel of titanic companies all coordinating their messaging. Literally every single company involved blogged about this and linked to each other on February 1st, 2023. What can we speculate by inspecting their sites?

Fair warning: none of this matters in any way.

Google: Interop 2023: continuing to improve the web for developers.

<time>Feb 1, 2023</time>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

<updated>2023-02-01T00:00:00Z</updated>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

The semantic <time> element is nice to see, but it’s missing the datetime attribute, which I think largely exists to help search engines, so you’d think Google would be all over that. The 00:00:00 value is conspicuous, making it seem like the date was plucked from a simple date picker and not altered during publishing. Or perhaps hand-written into a Markdown file. It’s unclear what CMS is in use here. I think Google uses an SSG for these sites… maybe Eleventy? But the HTML is hyper-optimized, omitting closing tags, quotes, whitespace, and the like where possible.

They are using Atom for the feed here, which is a slight outlier, and only including an <updated> stamp and not a <published>. Curious.

Apple: Pushing Interop Forward in 2023

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2023-02-01T09:00:39-08:00">

<p class="date">Feb 1, 2023</p>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

<pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:00:39 +0000</pubDate>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Apple using the Open Graph tag for publishing time here (rather than the less-used but more-standard Schema.org datePublished). It’s a WordPress site so probably some SEO plugin spitting this stuff out (which is good!). No semantics on that visible HTML output. The date in the RSS feed says 5 pm UTC time, making it 9 am Pacific Time which I bet was the agreed-upon publish time. I’m picturing them all on Zoom hitting the button together.

Bocoup: Interop 2023

<time class="post-date" datetime="2023-02-01">
  Feb 01
</time>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

<pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2023 05:00:59 +0000</pubDate>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Apple had Bocoup beat by 20 seconds here based on the RSS output. And that is the first showing of a fully semantically correct time element. They keep the title of the post super short, which you’d think might help win an SEO battle for that exact phrase, but no way Bocoup can even put up a fight against this troop. WordPress again here, which was a little harder to sniff out because of the super-compressed HTML (Cloudflare?) and only just a few stray assets with wp-content strings in the URLs. Builtwith sniffed out PHP somehow 🤷‍♀️.

Mozilla: Announcing Interop 2023

<abbr class="published" title="2023-02-01T09:02:13-08:00">
  February 1, 2023
</abbr>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

<pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:02:13 +0000</pubDate>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

An <abbr> for the publishing date. Cheeky! And two minutes thirteen over the buzzer on this WordPress site.

Microsoft: Microsoft Edge and Interop 2023

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2023-02-01T17:00:18+00:00">

<div class="article-header__date">
  February 1, 2023
</div>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

<pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2023 17:00:18 +0000</pubDate>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

I see the BEM shining through on that <div>! A mere 18 seconds over the buzzer, revealed in the Open Graph meta tag, tells me this team in on the ball. WordPress here is on theme.

Igalia: Igalia and Interop 2023

<meta content="2023-02-01T00:00:00+00:00" property="article:published_time">

<time datetime="2023-02-01T00:00:00+00:00" itemprop="datePublished">
  Feb 1, 2023
</time>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

<published>2023-02-01T00:00:00+00:00</published>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Check that semantically perfect time element, including structured data! Golf clap. Atom is used for the feed, a choice only shared by Google here. All the numbers are dead even on the strike of midnight on February 1st, so I assume this was generated from a choice where only the data was the input. AMP is present here which is I belive the only player using that. Builtwith is detecting Vue somehow, which I’m not really seeing, but maybe something like Nuxt or VuePress?