Your Agent Is an Infinite Canvas — RL Nabors, Dressed for Space

From web standards veteran to agentic web evangelist

Rachel Lee Nabors opens with a high-energy résumé lap: Mozilla, W3C, Microsoft Edge, React docs, and now Arize. Then she grounds it in a deeply human backstory — before big tech, she made web comics for teenage girls on iVillage, had 400,000 weekly readers, and learned to build for the web because that was how you reached people where they already were.

Why an old comic archive became an agent demo

The talk’s project starts with procrastination: her 2010-era comic archive was breaking, with 404s and dead CDN assets, so she decided not just to repair it but to “future-proof” it. Her goal was delightfully ambitious and messy: make one server work for humans in browsers, humans in agents, and agents in browsers — “they’ve got like this polycule thing going on.”

MCP transports, minus the mystique

She gives a practical distinction between local STDIO (“studio,” in her running joke) and HTTP transports for MCP. STDIO means command-line JSON and local process spawning that normal users hate; HTTP means a web service, POST requests, serverless friendliness, and a much simpler experience where a user can just paste a connector URL into Claude.

The comic tools are basically site navigation for agents

Her MCP server exposes tools that mirror the site itself: list comics, list storylines, list characters, search transcripts, search by character, and fetch transcripts in markdown. That symmetry is the point — don’t invent a weird parallel universe for agents; expose the structure your site already has.

Her loudest complaint: resources exist, but clients barely use them

This is where the talk gets spicy. Nabors says MCP resources are the right way to provide large text corpora like docs or comic transcripts, but the spec is loose and clients don’t surface them, so developers fall back to awful tool-based hacks that waste context and make models slurp markdown the hard way.

get page: the moment the agent stops being just a chat box

Her favorite demo is get page, a tool that returns an MCP app — a mini comic reader inside Claude with visuals, comments, next/previous navigation, and a text-mode transcript toggle. It’s her argument in one artifact: chat is the “lowest common denominator,” and users shouldn’t have to discover everything by interrogating a blank starfish-shaped text box.

The foot-guns of MCP apps are real

She walks through the implementation details with equal parts excitement and warning. MCP apps are single HTML files in sandboxed iframes, so assets often need bundling or base64 embedding, external resources need CSP/CORS care, there’s no localStorage, no direct network access, and links require host permission — a recurring “mother may I?” pattern.

Web MCP: turning every page into a mini tool server

She closes on Web MCP, which exposes forms or JS functions to in-browser agents so they can act on a page without screenshotting it or chewing through DOM/XML tokens. Using navigator.modelContext.registerTools, she demos a browser agent reading a comic transcript and moving to the next page, then lands the bigger thesis: the browser isn’t dying, it’s evolving, and APIs like Web Speech, Audio, Canvas, WASM, and CSS are all still there waiting to be used.