Foreword

There is no question that the Web has become an integral part of modern life for people around the world, connecting us to each other and to seemingly infinite portals of information in real time.

In the era of Web 2.0, barriers to participation have been lowered further and further, and we’ve seen the birth of myriad new people to connect, learn, share, and collaborate. From blogs to social networks, people are enjoying an increasingly rich online life.

And while the Web has dramatically enriched our lives, we have only just scratched the surface of its potential. Through the rapid expansion and enhancement of the information to which we have access, we’ve also lost a great deal of freedom and flexibility over it; although most people may not have noticed this yet, as “newer” is often perceived as “better.”

Many of the basic abilities we have when consuming and sharing information in the physical world have yet to make the jump to the digital realm. Most Web sites do not yet provide us the ability to integrate our own personal context into the presentation of information and the tools uniquely available to each of us. For instance, before the Web, planning a holiday trip often involved clipping articles and pictures from magazines, collecting brochures, taking tips and hints from friends, writing down details from travel agents, highlighting ratings and reviews of restaurants and hotels from travel books that we’ve bought or borrowed, noting suggestions on the best seats on an airplane from coworkers, and assembling all this information in one place, often the kitchen table, to finalize travel plans and itinerary.

It was a social experience with a great deal of interaction and discussion, integrated your own personal context (e.g., magazine subscriptions you had, books you owned, previous travel experiences, etc.), and was not overly constrained by the media or medium, from any one source (e.g., there were no technical or legal barriers to “mashing up” pictures of hotels with ratings from your guide books), as one could easily pull from all sources at once.

This experience – the ease of cutting and arranging articles and integrating context and tools from disparate sources – is not yet readily possible for people on the Web today. Users can only access the bits and pieces of information per Web page that have been explicitly included by the owner of that page; and while users can open multiple windows at once and switch between them, it becomes confusing, vexing, and often contradictory. Users have become frustrated by these limitations.

There’s increasing demand for flexibility and better tools that put the user in control of their online experience – providing the ability to create, combine, compare, customize, manage, share, and track information to fit their own unique individual needs and interests.

Just in time, exciting tools are coming out of academic and corporate research and development labs that have the potential to give users unprecedented control over information and experiences on the Web. The hope is that users can become much more than simply passive consumers of the content provided to them. They can be tinkerers, hackers (in the good sense), and remixers who build, use, and share tools to suit their needs, including making that kitchen table into an interactive suite of information.

These tools are aiding in the evolution of the Web from isolated silos of information and functionality to a platform that provides intuitive and accessible tools and capabilities that allow for the kind of individual control and access to personal context that we’ve come to appreciate in the physical world.

No Code Required presents these next set of tools that are allowing users, as information omnivores, to participate in the building and remixing of their Web. You’ll find the latest thinking, research, and efforts underway empower the masses to take the Web into their own hands and to provide people everywhere the tools and capabilities to and make it not only say but also do what they want. Leaders in their respective fields, the experts in this book provide us with the tools and the know-how to change the end user from consumer to developer, organizer, editor, or even travel agent.

As researchers and developers, we can all play a role in shaping our collective future. The sky is the limit. This book will help take us there.

Chris Beard

Chief Innovation Officer, Mozilla