Miriam Suzanne on developing the future of the internet

Miriam Suzanne

Whatever it is that you need, you should be able to bring your needs to the web and have them respected and that's all of us have different needs at different times and we should be able to interact with technology that respects those needs. That just seems like a fundamentally important thing to me that the tools we build respect the people that need to use them. And why would we not?

Rob Goodman

Hi, everyone and welcome to Now What? The podcast from Wix about how technology is changing everything. I'm your host Rob Goodman. And in this series, we're talking all about evolution in business, design, development and beyond. On today's show, we're joined by front end developer, author, artist and educator, Miriam Suzanne. Miriam has spent her career designing and developing the next phases of the internet. She builds websites and applications, works on making the web more accessible through browsers and pushes the boundaries of the technology that is the foundation of the web itself. Miriam is the co-founder of Oddbird web agency and an invited expert on the W3C CSS working group. Those are the folks defining how CSS will evolve to shape the web.

Rob Goodman

She's a co-author of SitePoint's Jump Start, SaSS, a staff writer for CSS Tricks and was a founding teacher on the Mozilla developer YouTube channel. Miriam is also a playwright and a musician. She joins Now What to talk about why the internet looks the way it does and how to change that. Why designers and developers need to move in lockstep with one another and how the feature of the web needs to be built around inclusivity and respect. Now, before we dive into our conversation, I want to mention that this is the last episode of our first season of Now What. Thanks so much for tuning in.

Rob Goodman

If you missed any of our episodes, now is a great time to go back and listen or you can listen again to some of our amazing conversations with folks like design leader Aarron Walter, crypto entrepreneur Ire Aderinokun, brand leader and co-founder of Red Antler agency, Emily Heyward. You can hear Richard Jennings at Warner Media talking about inclusivity in the design industry, Joy Cho of Oh Joy! talking about building a company on your own terms. So many incredible conversations that will give you a glimpse into what's to come in business, design, development and eCommerce, but also share the knowledge in know-how that you can bring into your work to better your teams, products and working practices today.

Rob Goodman

Oh, and please do share this show with a friend or colleague. And if you like what you're hearing, drop us a review on Apple Podcast too. Okay, get ready for a conversation all about the future of the web from one of the folks helping to define the path we take to get there. Let's get started with Miriam Suzanne. Miriam, welcome to the Now What podcast. So great to have you here.

Miriam Suzanne

Thanks. It's good to be here.

Rob Goodman

Why don't we start off hearing a little bit about what is keeping you busy these days, what you're working on, what you're studying, what you're teaching?

Miriam Suzanne

Sure. These days, I get to work a lot on the CSS specifications with the CSS working group and interacting with the Chrome team quite a bit on what they're building into the Chrome browser. So that's been a lot of fun and that's taking a lot of my time and focus.

Rob Goodman

And when you talk about the working group, just describe for listeners that's the W3C web consortium working group for CSS and you've been invited in as an expert on CSS?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, that's right. So the W3C is a shared organization of all of the companies that have some stake in the web. So you can imagine all of the browser vendors are there, representatives of Mozilla, and Apple, and Microsoft, and Google but then lots of other companies as well. It's a large list of companies that are involved, have some stake. Adobe is there, so on, so on. Then they also invite some people who work on the web to come and help provide expertise as a developer. So it's a lot of different people involved and the CSS working group is the part of the organization that's focused on what's happening with CSS? Where are we going next? What features need to be added to the language?

Rob Goodman

What is the process that happens in those rooms behind those closed doors or virtual rooms? What is a typical discussion like? What are the decision points that are made and how does that then roll out to web browsers and the folks who are at the gates of how people will actually interact with the web?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, it's super interesting, because there's parts of the process that are really formal and have steps and needs sign-off in particular ways. Then there's lots of aspects of this process that are really spread out among the browser vendors of people actually building the browsers make the final decision, right? They get to decide whether they put something in their browser or not. There's lots of conversation always, too, happening. Most of that is totally open to the public and on the CSS working group drafts GitHub, there's just thousands of open issues being discussed at any one time, some of them more actively than others.

Miriam Suzanne

If you try to follow all of them, that's some fire hose, there's no way you can follow everything that's happening exactly, but you pick out the ones that you're most interested in. And anybody can go on to GitHub and contribute to those conversations. Then we also meet weekly and have some bigger meetings couple times a year. Those aren't open to the public, but the transcripts are open. And most of those are posted back to specific issues on GitHub. So when you're reading through those issue threads, you will run into transcripts of the group discussing the issue. But then those ideas come from anywhere. Anybody can present new ideas. There's lots of discussion, lots of them interact. There's a lot of like, "Well, I had this idea, and you had this idea, how do they fit together? And people make proposals.

Miriam Suzanne

And then browsers can even at that proposal stage start experimenting with it behind the feature flag if they want to. So browsers will sometimes start prototyping really early on in the process. But then the formal part of the process is the entire working group agreeing that all of the browsers are okay with this, all of the browsers are willing to ship it, this will work for accessibility reasons, this will work technically and then that process of actually writing down the specification that everybody agrees on, that becomes fairly formal.

Miriam Suzanne

But along the way, browsers can do what they want in terms of starting to implement at whatever phase they want to and you have some totally complete specs that have never been implemented and some implementations that have never quite inspect. It's a bit of a mess and also a very formal mess.

Rob Goodman

So you have a front seat view of where the web is going, and you also have a hand in shaping it and pointing it in a certain direction. Can you take a step back and at a big picture view describe where you see the web going from your perspective?

Miriam Suzanne

It's a little bit hard to say if I actually have a front row and where the web is going. The working group can be in some ways reactive. In some ways, what we're building is ways to pave the cow paths that developers and designers have already started pushing on. So we're listening to where are the complaints? Where are things not quite working? Or sometimes it's like there's new hardware coming out. So foldable screens are coming out and we have to react to that and figure out how does he assess, handle a foldable screen.

Miriam Suzanne

I would say in some ways, where I can see five years down the future of CSS, but that future is really driven by what people are already trying to do and just running into issues with it.

Rob Goodman

Speaking of CSS, I've seen a lot of new developments happening in CSS. Can you describe for listeners what is actually going on with CSS? What's happening today in terms of changes and what you're expecting to come next?

Miriam Suzanne

CSS has gotten really active in the last couple years. I don't know exactly what kicked it off, it seems like.

Rob Goodman

Right.

Miriam Suzanne

Something around the time that grids came out, that's when there seemed to be a lot of energy that started to build. I don't know exactly what triggered that, but there is a lot of activity and it seems to me that there's a lot of browser interest and there's a lot of developer interest and new features. And what we're able to do constantly changes. So there's some features like container queries that we've been talking about for 12 years. This idea came up at the same time as media queries, it's not a new idea at all, but it finally feels like we actually have a path forward. That's because of a lot of people doing a lot of work to get us there and it's also just processors get more powerful over time, right? So we're able to play with new things.

Rob Goodman

Yeah. Can you describe what a container query is for the audience?

Miriam Suzanne

So we have media queries, which let you look at the size of the window, the size of the browser and respond to that and say, "Okay, when the browser is larger, I want this different layout that fills that extra space." But when the browser is small, I want things to flow in a single column or something. I don't need as much layout. So we've been able to do that since 2009, 2010 sometime in there. Media queries became really broadly available. But what people really want is to say, "Okay, but I've got this one component." It's my, I don't know, calendar component or it's my article card that has an image and a title and a summary. And I want it to layout differently not depending on the size of the overall window, but is it in the sidebar? If it's in the sidebar, it needs to be small. If it's in the main area, it can have more space.

Miriam Suzanne

So what is the size of its container and can we respond to that container? The problem is actually one of the coolest features of CSS, which is that CSS does this back and forth layout where the size of a parent can influence the size of the children in terms of nested dom structures. So you put something in the sidebar, the sidebar affects its size, but that sizing influence goes up the chain too. The sidebar can get bigger, because you put bigger things inside of it. So these containers and their contents are constantly negotiating back and forth.

Miriam Suzanne

So if you try to query the container and then change the size of the contents based on that query, you could end up creating an infinite loop. So that stopped us from ever doing it. But people over the years started putting features in place for locking down that loop and also making it okay that you do the loop once, as long as you don't do the loop more times. So that's where we are now and now the feature is possible. Now we can do it. It requires a couple of new tools and a couple new ideas that people have to learn, but it's possible now and we're working on it.

Rob Goodman

Why does all of this new evolution in the web and CSS specifically, why does it cascade down to the end user in a way that is going to make an impact on their experience on the web and even impact businesses in terms of what they can build and how quickly they can deliver. Talk to me in those terms of the impact of all these evolutionary steps happening right now.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, it's interesting and we won't always know exactly what the impact is. Some of the features that we're building are specifically to make it so that things that are hard for developers now, but they're doing anyway because their site calls for it, their app calls for it. Some of those things are difficult so they're spending too much time reinventing this problem over and over resolving the problem, and so we're coming up with features that are just going to make it quicker. And that will help companies’ bottom line. That will help developers be more efficient. So that's great. And then some of those features also, when we build them into the browser engine, they'll become more reliable, more robust and also more performant.

Miriam Suzanne

They can be handled internally by browser processes, which are highly optimized. And often those are problems that we were solving with something like JavaScript. JavaScript has two performance costs. One is the download of the script and then the other is the processing and running of that script and it has to run on top of all the browser processes. So it's just a slower thing to do. And if we can move all that logic into the browser, it becomes consistent for everyone. You don't have to rebuild it. You don't have to think through all of the edge cases, because the browser thought through them for you.

Miriam Suzanne

It's built into the main processes and can perform better. So we get a lot of bonuses there. And that performance can trickle down to the end user who's coming to your site. It's going to load for them better. It's going to perform better. It often improves accessibility, because developers aren't thinking through all of the accessibility edge cases and the browsers do have to think through them. Then some of the features are also things that you couldn't quite do with JaveScript or anything else. It's like we've had this idea that it was never quite possible the way you'd want it.

Miriam Suzanne

So actually putting it into the browser even makes that new thing possible and we can ship dark mode more easily for the users that need dark mode or something.

Rob Goodman

One of the things that I really enjoy in your talks is as a web developer, you also are a historian in a lot of ways of the web and understanding where the web has been to know where it can go. I love the ideas that you talk about in terms of the web needing to be fully forward compatible, backwards compatible and sideways compatible. And I want to hear a little bit in your own words what you mean by that and how that's even possible. It seems like a stretch.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, it definitely is a stretch and it's this ideal that we can ever quite perfectly achieve, but it's always an underlying vision of everything that we're doing. But yeah, in terms of the history I think the early documents are super fascinating the way they talk about this. If you look at the first website that Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN launched in '89, '90, '91 it was somewhere in there, '89 was their first proposal, '91 I think is when it went public. That initial website says, "This format needs to work everywhere," and since different devices have different capabilities, that means we'll never be able to do design on the web.

Miriam Suzanne

Design on the web will just never happen, because design assumes that every browser one is visual, is a visual browser and that's not true. There's audio browsers. And two that all of them have the same font capabilities, all of them have the same color capabilities. All of them have the same size. So it's just not going to happen. So the first attempt to that style sheets were all on the browser side. It was just browsers adding style sheets and each browser would have their own style sheets and you would just provide the HTML and the browser would decide based on the device and its own capabilities how to style your site. But nobody was quite happy with that. I think you can imagine.

Rob Goodman

Yeah, that doesn't sound too fun. Here, go ahead and make it look like whatever you want. It's just my stuff. It's just my information or my livelihood. Just do what you want with it.

Miriam Suzanne

Right, exactly. Don't worry, I won't provide any brand name. There was also a problem where as soon as you, if you make those restrictions and then you allow images, people just started making websites that are just an image. So there was this real fear that the web is going to become a fax machine where we're just sending around PDFs. And that's not ideal either. So we need to somehow solve this style problem. And right away, the first browser was released for the next machine, but that was a graphic interface and to prove their point they immediately release the second browser just for text only terminals.

Miriam Suzanne

So those didn't require a mouse, didn't require any graphics, et cetera. So right away, we have two browsers competing from the same team. They release both of the first two browsers and fundamentally different in what they could do.

Rob Goodman

Right.

Miriam Suzanne

But yeah, CSS came out of, it was really probably 15 different design proposals. Around '93, there was this race to come up with, how are we going to provide styles that browsers can ignore? That's the fundamental vision of CSS. We need a way to provide styles that we can provide branding. We can say that my branding is important here, and browsers can also say, "That's cool, but we don't support that, or on this device we have to do it differently." So the entire cascade of CSS is that, and the term cascade comes from this sense that there's going to be several people providing styles. Us as authors will provide branding. Users will provide preferences and they still do. They don't do it through CSS usually anymore, but users can still set font size preferences et cetera.

Rob Goodman

And there will be the browser, which knows everything about the context. It knows what the device can do. The browser will provide reasonable defaults and then finalize what's possible. So the cascade is a cascade of style sheets. We've got a cascade of these three origins of style sheets.

Rob Goodman

I love how on your website, you actually have controls in the top left to, I think it's font size spacing between the characters, light and dark mode. I was like, "I really want this. This is so cool." It's fun to play with, but then of course it's functional for the user.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, I'm glad to hear you like it. I was reading through the first proposal for CSS and he actually has a diagram in there of like, "If you're getting styles from the user and styles from the author," what if you had little sliders where you could go back and forth and do 75% of the author's colors and 75% of the user's typography or whatever. It's just theoretical. There's no detail on how that would work. It's just like, what if we could do this? Immediately, there's some problems there like what if I want yellow text on a blue background and you want it to be blue text on a yellow background, and we average those to get green text on a green background. It doesn't work. How are we going to average Times and Helvetica? What's the average?

Rob Goodman

Exactly.

Miriam Suzanne

I don't know.

Rob Goodman

Exactly.

Miriam Suzanne

But there are some ways that we can do this, so yeah I built a few onto my site ways that the user can re-theme it how they want.

Rob Goodman

Yeah, I think the idea of collaboration and connection in this middle ground between the user and the authors, gosh, that is so interesting just in terms of creative artwork on the web and experience. Yeah, there's a push, pull there but certainly I could envision projects that are built for that, built to be messed with, to be played with, to be broken in some ways just for that collaboration to take place and that sounds incredible.

Miriam Suzanne

I come out of a theater and performance art background and I feel like this vision of the web as this collaboration between browsers, authors and users all having their say. And somehow we're going to create a design based on that. That's a fundamentally weird radical performance art thing. I love it when people play with that and release little artistic code projects that play with it.

Rob Goodman

Is that part of your philosophy around web development and as a creative person are you thinking from that vantage point as you're making?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, definitely. I think that what I'm interested in is this idea of being able to make art and technology that respects the queerness of the user that doesn't assume all people are the same, doesn't assume everybody wants the same thing and really tries to embrace. I can set up a few settings for you, but I don't really know what you'll want. What if I give you more options than I think you need and let you play with it and figure it out yourself? And I still get some control over those for my site. I can set up the parameters, although because it's an open web people can just go in and break the styles on my site for themselves. You can view source, you can turn off styles whatever you want.

Miriam Suzanne

But yeah, that back and forth, that's always in front of my mind. I think what's really interesting about the web is how do I give you agency while interacting with my content.

Rob Goodman

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Rob Goodman

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Rob Goodman

One of the things that you and I have talked about is the intersection of design and development. And as all these new evolutions are happening on the web and in CSS, what do you think the right process or collaborative intersection should be between designers and developers so that one can keep the other informed of where the web is going and the possibilities and bring that collaboration to a faster speed?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah. I think collaboration is the right word. There's not exactly a right answer, because different people have different skillsets, different interests. There's no one solution that's going to work for everybody, but I think they have to be intertwined, development and design on the web. It's an interactive format and what we're able to code influences what we can present visually or interactively. There has to be that back and forth. So on our team, our primary designer doesn't write a lot of code. So then for us it means often pairing. So we'll have a designer and a front end developer sitting together looking at the code and the developer is writing the code and saying what's possible and the designer is answering questions about how should this move? How should this change?

Miriam Suzanne

You can't tell that from a markup usually like, "Okay, but here is related to what." And when the browser changes and when the user scrolls, when they change the size of the window, how do things move? It's hard to think through those things without looking at them. So we'll often do a static sketch of this is roughly the UX we're going for. Then the developer will roughly code a prototype of that sketch. Here's roughly the pieces that we need, and then we'll sit together and we'll pair program the final steps. How does it actually move? What are the actual finalized styles of it?

Miriam Suzanne

There are lots of different ways to do that depending on the people and the skills. The important thing is that you don't have those teams separated. You don't keep them apart. So how you do that details of the collaboration, figure it out team by team but there has to be that tight back and forth between design and development.

Rob Goodman

Is there advice you would give for people who are trying to figure out what is going to work best for them like certain questions they might ask their team or different sides of the equation in order to get to a place where they can get a system in place that works for them?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, there's a general framework that I have in mind, which is like how late can we make the final decisions about a design? How far off can we push that. So if you as a designer, your process is sketches and then I wire frame it and then I do all the details, I pick the border color and I make sure it's eight pixels of spacing instead of six pixels of spacing whatever, how late can you push those decisions in the process? Start with that initial sketch and then already be going to developers and talking through the sketch. How often can you go back and forth and integrate development into that process?

Miriam Suzanne

If possible, can we wait to decide if it's eight pixels or six pixels until we're in the browser actually playing with it in space? So design doesn't have to happen entirely in the browser. It can if that's your skillset. I find it easier to design in the browser sometimes because I'm fast with CSS. Not everyone is, that's fine, but we all have to look at it in the browser before we ship it because that's the real thing and that's what we have to make sure is working the way we intended.

Rob Goodman

You mentioned your team, I'd love to hear more about Oddbird, which is your agency. I believe it started about 12 years ago and you started with your siblings, which I feel like we could do a whole podcast just about running a business with your family, but talk to me about the kind of work you do there. I would love to hear the origin story of the agency, but walk me through some of the projects and some of the work that you're doing there.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, it was a coincidental thing that we started it. My brothers and I weren't real close at the time, but we realized that a few of us were starting to freelance on the web and we're like, "Oh, if we did this together," my older brother is a Django developer backend expert and I was working on the front end and we started it and we're like, "Hey, you do backend and I do front end," and we're both freelancing. What if we had a brand? Then my younger brother came along and said, "I would like to do this too." So he picked up JavaScript.

Miriam Suzanne

And it's gone really well. For the first five years, it was the three of us and we've just been doing agency client work, but a real range of projects, everything from very small businesses and nonprofits to Mozilla. We got a job with Mozilla a couple years in. We saw Mozilla as this big company that knows everything about the web, but we were building internal products for their QA team and Mozilla's QA team doesn't know how to build a product or a web app. They know how to do QA on a web app.

Rob Goodman

Right.

Miriam Suzanne

So it was interesting realizing, "Oh yeah, even working with the big players, we're experts in our part of it." And it built from there. We started hiring a few other contractors and now we're a team of eight and still doing a lot of the same work although more of the large projects. It's a mix of building a new product from scratch. A lot of it is internal products for companies, but then also client facing products for new start-ups or mid size companies that are moving their thing online. A lot of it is building things from scratch, but then also coming in and helping them refactor, move from floats to grids, build in a design system. That's been a lot of the work recently. How companies move to a component library and design system things like that.

Rob Goodman

Yeah, and I'm curious about the past several years and the evolution towards widgets, components, plug-ins, ways to systematize design and development in a way that you're not starting from scratch every time more rapid development, more APIs to plug-in payments and things like that. How is that starting to change your approach to your work and just the value that that has brought to the ecosystem recently?

Miriam Suzanne

I find it really interesting and it's I think also interesting for me, because I've specialized in doing custom work for people when the frameworks out there don't fit you, we can do the customized thing that you need. In some ways, design systems feel like the opposite of that like inventing the framework so that you don't have to do anything custom. I think that's an interesting push and pull and I really enjoy it. What I liked doing about building the custom thing was thinking through what's the system we need and how was the old system not appropriate. So that's what we get to do when we come in and help them. The science systems think, "Okay, but what's your situation? What are the skills of your designers and developers? What is the flow of your process?"

Miriam Suzanne

For me, design systems are not as much about the product as they are tooling flow and how are we going to integrate this with your day to day. If it doesn't integrate with your day to day it's not useful you're going to break it. Patterns don't exist unless we document them. If we don't document them, they stop existing the next day. So it's all about that, thinking through what are your needs? How do we build a system that fits into your flow? I think that design systems is very much like dev ops but for the whole product life cycle.

Miriam Suzanne

It's about day to day like, "Okay, we need a new feature. Do we have existing patterns for the designers to draw?" Let's go look at our design system. So right away, when the designer is starting on the new feature, it's part of their flow to check the existing patterns, check the existing design tokens, colors, fonts, whatever and know what are the pieces that they are working with, or do they need to invent something new? Is there something missing that they're trying to invent? So it ties in right away to the designer's process and can speed them up. They can get these Lego pieces to start putting together in a new way to build the new feature, which can help them skip steps, pull on existing work.

Miriam Suzanne

And then also when it goes from the designer to the developer, it's possible that less communication is needed in that transition because we can just say we have this pattern of info buttons. I don't know. Just use the pattern and then the developer only needs a napkin sketch of the idea to start implementing, because they know what all the pieces are and they can just go grab them. So it can make that back and forth quite a bit more efficient. So that process stuff. And in the end, you can get this advantage of the whole site is more consistent, accessibility is baked into the components, you're not having to think about every little ARIA role at every moment, lots of steps you can skip once you've built the system correctly.

Rob Goodman

And at Wix, we just released our Wix accessibility wizard and I know accessibility is becoming more and more important on the web. I want to hear a little bit from you about why that is so critical to expanding the web as we know it, giving more people access obviously, but what are the repercussions for developers and designers and ultimately for more people to experience what is possible on the web.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, I think there are several answers to that question. I would start with that sense of the web wanting to respect users’ queerness, right? Whatever it is that you need, you should be able to bring your needs to the web and have them respected, and that's all of us have different needs at different times and we should be able to interact with technology that respects those needs. That just seems like a fundamentally important thing to me that the tools we build, respect the people that need to use them. And people have a lot of different access needs and why would we not build tools that respect people's access needs?

Miriam Suzanne

You can take that and then build on it and say, "Okay well, also, if we're excluding people, that might hurt our bottom line." And then we can take it a step further and say also our government has passed laws that say there are specific accessibility requirements of public businesses and those laws apply to the web as well. So if you won't do it for humans, do it for the lawyers.

Rob Goodman

I'm curious you've been hiring at your agency, you're interacting with tons of folks out in the web development space. What are some of the roles of the future that you're seeing are going to start popping up in terms of actual jobs and positions and new needs out there?

Miriam Suzanne

There's things like right now, I think, people that deal with HTML and CSS are under respected, underpaid, under hired. There's a lot of companies that have 30 backend devs or JavaScript devs and one person that understands HTML and CSS. I don't think the balance is right there. I think we need to improve on that. HTML and CSS are design roles and are user interactuals. They're the front of what your user is interacting with. And if we don't give those the proper respect, we're not building the web we could. So that's something where the role already exists, we're just not using it. I think in terms of the work that I'm doing right now with the CSS working group and writing specs, there's a lack of process to get into this role.

Miriam Suzanne

There was no training steps like I couldn't work my way up in the field towards being a spec writer except just trying to pay attention to it. That's how a lot of people end up there is just you've been doing it for a while and you have some ideas, you talk to somebody in the group and they invite you to join. I think it would be really interesting if this was more of a role that we facilitated with a career path, get involved in spec writing, learn to do it, learn to think about the language as a whole. What if that was a job we had? I don't know what it looks like exactly, but I'd like to see it.

Rob Goodman

I love that and it sounds like an amazing way to speed that evolution, getting more people focused on the core architecture and what can be possible with it.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, exactly. And make sure it doesn't feel like a black box decisions being made behind closed doors. Even I for a very long time assumed these decisions just get made somehow magically somewhere else. And they were considered that it was a job I could have impacting what comes next in CSS.

Rob Goodman

You're publishing your learnings, your notes or on your website and you're very transparent and as you said the W3C is also about what's happening. So I love that the wall is nonexistent in terms of what's going on and the idea that you can train more people to basically speak this language and contribute to what the future will be is an amazing way to bridge that knowledge with action.

Miriam Suzanne

There's a thing that can be scary about it where even in the group we have different specialties. There's browser engineers and I am not a browser engineer. So I'm presenting ideas from a developer, author standpoint and saying like here's a syntax that I think could work. But then the browser engineers have to come in and say, "Is that actually possible? Can we actually do that in a performant way?" None of us know every single part of the system and that's okay. And people coming from the outside may feel overwhelmed that they don't know some part of the system, but together we figure it out.

Rob Goodman

And you talk about the passion you have for creating art and software that really focuses on celebrating the queer complexity of the human experience. Where does that come from? Ultimately, what is the driver behind that? What's the brighter future of the web that you hope to create through that mission and welcome people in?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, I think we've touched on sections of it. I like people having autonomy and respecting that sense that there's not a normal that we all are a part of. And when we define a normal, we're usually excluding somebody and it's usually more about power than it is about actual numbers. So what if we let it go? And what if we allowed users to be different and respected that autonomy and really focused on it? Then I mix that with my artistic interests of like I think interaction is interesting. What happens when we try to make artwork that is partially for me and partially what you bring? And what comes out of those interactions.

Miriam Suzanne

For me, it's both angles of that of a moral imperative to respect people in their differences and then also a creative curiosity of what comes out when we do that? What's possible when we're all pushing on this thing together?

Rob Goodman

I love how your background in making music in a band, writing plays, performance art, all of that connects to your work. Are you actively creating it all times both at work on the web and in your other creative endeavors?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, I think of them as very much related. I think it can look like I'm doing lots of things at once, but usually it's project cycles. It's like I will pay a little bit less attention to the web for six months while I work on a novel.

Rob Goodman

Right.

Miriam Suzanne

And then I will stop thinking about novels for three years and focus on the web for a while and then follow the work that's there. If I have free time, can I come up with something on my own. I'm ADHD and try to put that to good use instead of letting it just destroy my career or something.

Rob Goodman

I'm glad we get to benefit from all of the creativity and outputs that you're having both in the creative work that you're doing and in the web work that you're doing to make the web more accessible, more open to more people and evolve so quickly. I want to close by asking, what is putting fuel in your tank these days where coming out of this past year, which was so challenging when you're looking to recharge, when you're looking to be inspired, are you looking at other websites, developers, designers? Are you just getting out into nature reading? What are the things that you get to reset and refuel your brain and your work with?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, it's a lot of different things, but tonight I have my first band practice in a year and a half and that sort of thing is very exciting to me and I'm terrified. We're all vaccinated, but I'm going to be in a small room with people. I haven't done that. Right now, that's really exciting to me and also I'm still fairly new to this CSS specification process and there is a lot of new ideas floating around, a lot that I get to play with and see what happens. So right now, that's really exciting to me, just finding my way through it and being very much lost along the way, but getting to play with a lot of really interesting ideas and talk with people who have been doing it for longer.

Miriam Suzanne

There's a play that I've been needing to write for a longtime and I started writing recently. So that's another thing that's giving me a little momentum right now. A lot of that is I was feeling depressed and stuck at home and all I did was work, because there was a pandemic and so I reached out to people and said, "Hey, if you gave me some accountability on this writing project, I think if I had some accountability I would start writing and I think if I started writing, I would feel less depressed." So let's make it happen.

Rob Goodman

Amazing. And you found that group really helpful and holding you the task and your creative output and being a support system?

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah, and it's interesting, even when I have to hold them to task, to hold me to task and I have to say like, "Hey, I need to check in now." It still works. I feel like, well, I'm getting stuck so if I bring in some other brains to push me, maybe I can get unstuck.

Rob Goodman

Amazing. Miriam, thank you so much for joining the show. This was such a pleasure to talk to you and I feel like we covered so much ground. Thank you so much for sharing so much with us.

Miriam Suzanne

Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's been great chatting with you.

Rob Goodman

Thanks for listening to our episode with Miriam Suzanne. This was such a great conversation about the structure of the web and what it looks like to create a web that is welcoming for everyone. In talking with Miriam, I really got to know the value of having design and development be intertwined, making sure that teams are sat together, that there's conversation collaboration and connection between those worlds, because each relies on the other to build products and create experiences that will work from a code perspective but also delight in their motion and design for users.

Rob Goodman

It's really stuck with me what Miriam said about the future of the web that it should be a place for everyone where whatever it is that you need, you should be able to bring those needs to the web. A person should be able to interact with the web and technology should respect those needs. It's about inclusive design, but it's more broadly about respect for all people and building a web that is welcoming for all. You can learn more about Miriam at miriamsuzanne.com. She has lots of talks, interviews and articles out there.

Rob Goodman

We've captured many of them in our show notes along with the transcript of this interview, all on our website at wix.com/nowwhat. Remember to revisit all of our episodes from this season and you'll be hearing from us again soon.

Rob Goodman

Thanks so much for listening. This is Now What by Wix, the podcast about how technology is changing everything. Now What is hosted and produced by me, Rob Goodman, executive producer for content at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Our executive producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow, Shani Moore, Omer Shai and me, Rob Goodman. You can discover more about the show and our guests at wix.com/nowwhat. Be sure to subscribe and follow the show for new episodes wherever you get your podcast.

Rob Goodman

If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast and share this show with your friends and colleagues. Will see you soon.