Two years ago I inherited jsdom, a project of breathtaking scope. In essence, it aims to simulate a browser in JavaScript, by implementing JavaScript versions of a wide variety of web standards (much more than just the DOM).

While maintaining jsdom for the last two years, and eventually bringing it to a 1.0 release, I learned an incredible amount about the web.

I want to share with you what I’ve learned: the history of the standards and implementations of them that make up the web; the interaction between seemingly-disparate parts of the platform; and all about the strange APIs we’ve come to know and love.

You should walk away from this talk with a new appreciation for how browsers work—and how, through the ongoing effort of a community of contributors and package maintainers, we’ve been able to recreate one in pure JavaScript.

For more, check out jsdom on GitHub.