I’d planned to start the day with an early walk on the beach, but sleep won and I didn’t get up until 7:30. After washing up, I went down for breakfast. The staff seated each guest instead of letting us choose a table, which made the service feel more attentive than I expected. There was plenty to choose from, though in the morning I mostly want congee. The only letdown was the fried dough sticks: they were so hard that I had to soak them for a long time before they softened.
Japanese-style breakfast at the hotel
I hadn’t forgotten the real reason for being there, so after breakfast I headed to the conference. The morning session appeared to be a general one, but the speakers talked fast and I only caught the general shape of it — in truth, I didn’t understand much. One talk was about making W3C specifications more sustainable; another presented findings from a developer survey that W3C and MDN had run together.
After the talks, Bingjing wanted to visit a nearby MUJI, so we walked over. On the way we passed the Chinese Consulate in Fukuoka. Next to it, at Kyushu Hospital, an ambulance was dealing with an emergency. We heard ambulance sirens quite often during the trip, which felt like another small reminder of Japan’s aging population.
We also passed a supermarket and went in. Seafood was a little cheaper, but meat and vegetables were extremely expensive. It was hard not to comment on the cost of living.
About ten-plus yuan for three slices of pork, tens of yuan for a small portion of beef slices, and ten-plus yuan for half a daikon.
At MUJI I spent a while browsing and suddenly took a liking to a very ordinary hat. It was sunny that day and I hadn’t brought any sun protection, so I bought it. At the register, the cashier said something in Japanese and I froze; she realized I probably couldn’t follow and simply said Credit Card. The transaction was done quickly. The hat came to nearly 200 RMB, which is expensive, but it was a rare trip.
We went back for lunch. Bingjing needed to buy a small appliance, so we crossed over to Markis nearby. Passing the arcade, I saw two girls playing Taiko no Tatsujin — a surprisingly rare sight. We looked around the shops and found that games in Japan really are expensive. Wenli checked out Switch games and I looked at PS games, and we both concluded they were cheaper back home. [shrug]
Two girls playing Taiko no Tatsujin — I sneaked a look and got caught.
In the afternoon we attended three discussion sessions. The first was about a white paper on Chinese mini programs. My overall impression was that the English level in the room was uneven: Anqi and Julia spoke clearly and I could follow them fairly well, while some of the other speakers were harder to understand. The session was mainly meant to introduce outsiders to what mini programs are and how they’re implemented. People offered some useful suggestions. Daniel from Mozilla proposed considering putting package.json content into manifest.json and submitting that to the PWA manifest working group. There was skepticism too. The biggest question was obvious to many: most mini-program functionality is implemented on the client side, so what does this have to do with the Web, or with W3C? I thought that was the key question. People also raised mini-program ARIA accessibility, security, and the problem of reinventing the wheel by avoiding the DOM. The head of W3C asked whether the draft was mature enough to be taken into a working group or whether it needed incubation first.
Fukuoka Tower at night
For the second session I followed Wenli to a talk on Web codecs. As far as I understood, it was about providing an official API for encoding and decoding video streams in different formats, and even for muxing audio and video streams. By that point I could only follow the broad strokes. The question that stuck with me was about audio encoding: related APIs already exist in Web Audio, so is there really a need to build another API for the same kind of functionality?
Children’s play equipment seems to be standard in Japanese apartment complexes.
The third session I picked was about image formats. The discussion was whether, with support for the latest video format .AV, there should also be consideration for .AV images. We went through the current state of various formats in different browsers. The most interesting moment was Jake saying that Safari supports encoding in HEVC but not decoding, and that canvas can export that format. That confused everyone. Supporting encoding but not decoding seemed bizarre, and unfortunately the Safari colleague in the room couldn’t confirm what was going on.
Jake, in the middle
Jake was one of the people from the Jake and Paul video series I had translated. Meeting him in person was exciting. After those videos gave me such a hard time, I half wanted to go up and punch him — joking, of course.
After dinner that evening, Wenli and I walked along the nearby beach. The sea breeze and the sound of the waves were lovely. On the way back we passed Fukuoka Dome, where a local baseball team seemed to be playing; the area was lively. I saw an extremely cute kid who posed for us in all sorts of ways. Very adorable.
