Here’s a perfect example I bumped into earlier this week, courtesy of The Green Web Foundation. This looks like a
hyperlink… but if you open it in a new tab/window, you see a page (not even a 404 page!) with the text “It looks like nothing was found at this location.”
In the site shown in the screenshot above, the developer took something the web gave them for free (a hyperlink), threw it away (by making it a link-to-nowhere), and rebuilt its
functionality with Javascript (without thinking about the fact that you can do more with hyperlinks than click them: you can click-and-drag them, you can bookmark them, you can share
them, you can open them in new tabs etc.). Ugh.
Something you can clearly type a numeric day, month and year into is best.
Three dropdowns are slightly worse, but at least if you use native HTML <select> elements keyboard
users can still “type” to filter.
Everything else – including things that look like <select>s but are really funky React <div>s, is pretty terrible.
Calendars can be great for choosing your holiday date range. But pressing “Prev” ~480 times to get to my month of birth isn’t good. Also: what’s with the time “sliders”? (Yes, I know I’ve implemented these myself, in the past, and I’m sorry.)
People designing webforms that require me to enter my birthdate:
I am begging you: just let me type it in.
Typing it in is 6-8 quick keystrokes. Trying to navigate a little calendar or spinny wheels back to the 1970s is time-consuming, frustrating and unnecessary.
They’re right. Those little spinny wheels are a pain in the arse if you’ve got to use one to go back 40+ years.
These things are okay (I guess) on mobile/touchscreen devices, though I’d still prefer the option to type in my date of birth. But send one to my desktop and I will
curse your name.
Can we do worse?
If there’s one thing we learned from making the worst volume control in the world, the other
year, it’s that you can always find a worse UI metaphor. So here’s my attempt at making a date of birth field that’s somehow
even worse than “date spinners”:
My datepicker implements a game of “higher/lower”. Starting from bounds specified in the HTML code and a random guess, it
narrows-down its guess as to what your date of birth is as you click the up or down buttons. If you make a mistake you can start over with the restart button.
Amazingly, this isn’t actually the worst datepicker into which I’ve entered my date of birth! It’s cognitively challenging compared to most, but it’s relatively fast at
narrowing down the options from any starting point. Plus, I accidentally implemented some good features that make it better than plenty of the datepickers out there:
It’s progressively enhanced – if the Javascript doesn’t load, you can still enter your date of birth in a sensible way.
Because it leans on a <input type="date"> control, your browser takes responsibility for localising, so if you’re from one of those weird countries that prefers
mm-dd-yyyy then that’s what you should see.
It’s moderately accessible, all things considered, and it could easily be improved further.
It turns out that even when you try to make something terrible, so long as you’re building on top of the solid principles the web gives you for free, you can accidentally end
up with something not-so-bad. Who knew?
While talking about external CSS, he hinted at what I consider to be a distinct fourth way with its own unique use
cases:; using the Link: HTTP header. I’d like to share with you how it works and why I think it needs to be
kept in people’s minds, even if it’s not suitable for widespread deployment today.
Injecting CSS using the Link: HTTP Header
Every one of Jeremy’s suggestions involve adding markup to the HTML document itself. Which makes sense; you almost always
want to associate styles with a document regardless of the location it’s stored or the medium over which it’s transmitted. The most popular approach to adding CSS to a page uses the <link> HTML element, but did you know… the <link> element has a semantically-equivalent HTTP header,Link:.
A webserver adds headers when it serves a document anyway. Adding one more is no big deal.
Why is this important?
This isn’t something you should put on your website right now. This (21-year-old!) standard is still only really supported in Firefox and pre-Blink Opera, so you lose perhaps 95% of the
Web (it could be argued that because CSSought to be considered progressive enhancement, it’s tolerable so long as your
HTML is properly-written).
If it were widely-supported, though, that would be a really good thing: HTTP headers beat meta/link tags for configurability, performance management, and separation of concerns. Need some specific examples? Sure:
here’s what you could use HTTP stylesheet linking for:
You have no idea how many times in my career I’d have injected CSS Link: headers using a reverse proxy server the
standard was universally-implemented. This technique would have made one of my final projects at the Bodleian so much easier…
Performance improvement using aggressively preloaded “top” stylesheets before the DOM parser even fires up.
Stylesheet injection by edge caches to provide regionalised/localised changes to brand identity.
Strong separation of content and design by hosting content and design elements in different systems.
Branding your staff intranet differently when it’s accessed from outside the network than inside it.
Rebranding proprietary services on your LAN without deep inspection, using reverse proxies.
Less-destructive user stylesheet injection by plugins etc. that doesn’t risk breaking icky on-page Javascript (e.g. theme switchers).
Browser detection? 😂 You could use this technique today to detect Firefox. But you absolutely
shouldn’t; if you think you need browser detection in CSS, use this instead.
Unfortunately right now though, stylesheet Link: headers remain consigned to the bin of “cool stylesheet standards that we could probably use if it weren’t for fucking Google”; see also
alternate stylesheets.
This weekend I announced and then hosted Homa Night II, an effort to use
technology to help bridge the chasms that’ve formed between my diaspora of friends as a result mostly of COVID. To a lesser extent
we’ve been made to feel distant from one another for a while as a result of our very diverse locations and lifestyles, but the resulting isolation was certainly compounded by lockdowns
and quarantines.
Long gone are the days when I could put up a blog post to say “Troma Night tonight?” and expect half a dozen friends to turn up at my house.
Back in the day we used to have a regular weekly film night called Troma Night, named after the studio
who dominated our early events and whose… genre… influenced many of our choices thereafter. We had over 300 such film
nights, by my count, before I eventually left our shared hometown of Aberystwyth ten years ago. I wasn’t the last one of the Troma Night
regulars to leave town, but more left before me than after.
Observant readers will spot a previous effort I made this year at hosting a party online.
Earlier this year I hosted Sour Grapes, a murder mystery party (an irregular highlight of our Aberystwyth social calendar,
with thanks to Ruth) run entirely online using a mixture of video chat and “second screen”
technologies. In some ways that could be seen as the predecessor to Homa Night, although I’d come up with most of the underlying technology to make Homa Night possible on a
whim much earlier in the year!
The idea spun out of a few conversations on WhatsApp but the final name – Homa Night – wasn’t agreed until early in November.
How best to make such a thing happen? When I first started thinking about it, during the first of the UK’s lockdowns, I considered a few options:
Streaming video over a telemeeting service (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.)
Very simple to set up, but the quality – as anybody who’s tried this before will attest – is appalling. Being optimised for speech rather than music and sound effects gives the audio
a flat, scratchy sound, video compression artefacts that are tolerable when you’re chatting to your boss are really annoying when they stop you reading a crucial subtitle, audio and
video often get desynchronised in a way that’s frankly infuriating, and everybody’s download speed is limited by the upload speed of the host, among other issues. The major benefit of
these platforms – full-duplex audio – is destroyed by feedback so everybody needs to stay muted while watching anyway. No thanks!
Teleparty or a similar tool Teleparty (formerly Netflix Party, but it now supports more services) is a pretty clever way to get almost exactly what I want:
synchronised video streaming plus chat alongside. But it only works on Chrome (and some related browsers) and doesn’t work on tablets, web-enabled TVs, etc., which would exclude some
of my friends. Everybody requires an account on the service you’re streaming from, potentially further limiting usability, and that also means you’re strictly limited to the media
available on those platforms (and further limited again if your party spans multiple geographic distribution regions for that service). There’s definitely things I can learn from
Teleparty, but it’s not the right tool for Homa Night.
“Press play… now!”
The relatively low-tech solution might have been to distribute video files in advance, have people download them, and get everybody to press “play” at the same time! That’s at least
slightly less-convenient because people can’t just “turn up”, they have to plan their attendance and set up in advance, but it would certainly have worked and I seriously
considered it. There are other downsides, though: if anybody has a technical issue and needs to e.g. restart their player then they’re basically doomed in any attempt to get back
in-sync again. We can do better…
A custom-made synchronised streaming service…?
A custom solution that leveraged existing infrastructure for the “hard bits” proved to be the right answer.
So obviously I ended up implementing my own streaming service. It wasn’t even that hard. In case you want to try your own, here’s how I did it:
Media preparation
First, I used Adobe Premiere to create a video file containing both of the night’s films, bookended and separated by “filler” content to provide an introduction/lobby, an intermission,
and a closing “you should have stopped watching by now” message. I made sure that the “intro” was a nice round duration (90s) and suitable for looping because I planned to hold people
there until we were all ready to start the film. Thanks to Boris & Oliver for the background
music!
Honestly, the intermission was just an excuse to keep my chroma key gear out following its most-recent use.
Next, I ran the output through Handbrake to produce “web optimized” versions in 1080p and 720p output sizes. “Web optimized” in this case means that
metadata gets added to the start of the file to allow it to start playing without downloading the entire file (streaming) and to allow the calculation of what-part-of-the-file
corresponds to what-part-of-the-timeline: the latter, when coupled with a suitable webserver, allows browsers to “skip” to any point in the video without having to watch the intervening
part. Naturally I’m encoding with H.264 for the widest possible compatibility.
Even using my multi-GPU computer for the transcoding I had time to get up and walk around a bit.
Real-Time Synchronisation
To keep everybody’s viewing experience in-sync, I set up a Firebase account for the application: Firebase provides an easy-to-use Websockets
platform with built-in data synchronisation. Ignoring the authentication and chat features, there wasn’t much
shared here: just the currentTime of the video in seconds, whether or not introMode was engaged (i.e. everybody should loop the first 90 seconds, for now), and
whether or not the video was paused:
Firebase makes schemaless real-time databases pretty easy.
To reduce development effort, I never got around to implementing an administrative front-end; I just manually went into the Firebase database and acknowledged “my” computer as being an
administrator, after I’d connected to it, and then ran a little Javascript in my browser’s debugger to tell it to start pushing my video’s currentTime to the server every
few seconds. Anything else I needed to edit I just edited directly from the Firebase interface.
Other web clients’ had Javascript to instruct them to monitor these variables from the Firebase database and, if they were desynchronised by more than 5 seconds, “jump” to the correct
point in the video file. The hard part of the code… wasn’t really that hard:
// Rewind if we're passed the end of the intro loopfunction introModeLoopCheck() {
if (!introMode) return;
if (video.currentTime > introDuration) video.currentTime =0;
}
function fixPlayStatus() {
// Handle "intro loop" modeif (remotelyControlled && introMode) {
if (video.paused) video.play(); // always play
introModeLoopCheck();
return; // don't look at the rest
}
// Fix current timeconst desync =Math.abs(lastCurrentTime - video.currentTime);
if (
(video.paused && desync > DESYNC_TOLERANCE_WHEN_PAUSED) ||
(!video.paused && desync > DESYNC_TOLERANCE_WHEN_PLAYING)
) {
video.currentTime = lastCurrentTime;
}
// Fix play statusif (remotelyControlled) {
if (lastPaused &&!video.paused) {
video.pause();
} elseif (!lastPaused && video.paused) {
video.play();
}
}
// Show/hide paused notification
updatePausedNotification();
}
Web front-end
Finally, there needed to be a web page everybody could go to to get access to this. As I was hosting the video on S3+CloudFront anyway, I put the HTML/CSS/JS there too.
I decided to carry the background theme of the video through to the web interface too.
I tested in Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Safari on desktop, and (slightly less) on Firefox, Chrome and Safari on mobile. There were a few quirks to work around, mostly to do with browsers
not letting videos make sound until the page has been interacted with after the video element has been rendered, which I carefully worked-around by putting a popup “over” the
video to “enable sync”, but mostly it “just worked”.
Delivery
On the night I shared the web address and we kicked off! There were a few hiccups as some people’s browsers got disconnected early on and tried to start playing the film before it was
time, and one of these even when fixed ran about a minute behind the others, leading to minor spoilers leaking via the rest of us riffing about them! But on the whole, it worked. I’ve
had lots of useful feedback to improve on it for the next version, and I might even try to tidy up my code a bit and open-source the results if this kind of thing might be useful to
anybody else.
I’ve been working as part of the team working on the new application framework called the Endpoint Encabulator and wanted to share with you what I think makes our project so
exciting: I promise it’ll make for two minutes of your time you won’t seen forget!
Naturally, this project wouldn’t have been possible without the pioneering work that preceded it by John Hellins Quick, Bud Haggart, and others. Nothing’s invented in a vacuum. However,
my fellow developers and I think that our work is the first viable encabulator implementation to provide inverse reactive data binding suitable for deployment in front of a
blockchain-driven backend cache. I’m not saying that all digital content will one day be delivered through Endpoint Encabulator, but… well; maybe it will.
If the technical aspects go over your head, pass it on to a geeky friend who might be able to make use of my work. Sharing is caring!
I was chatting with a fellow web developer recently and made a joke about the HTML <blink> and
<marquee> tags, only to discover that he had no idea what I was talking about. They’re a part of web history that’s fallen off the radar and younger developers are
unlikely to have ever come across them. But for a little while, back in the 90s, they were a big deal.
Even Macromedia Dreamweaver, which embodied the essence of 1990s web design, seemed to treat wrapping
<blink> in <marquee> as an antipattern.
Invention of the <blink> element is often credited to Lou Montulli, who wrote pioneering web browser Lynx before being joining Netscape in 1994. He insists that he didn’t write any
of the code that eventually became the first implementation of <blink>. Instead, he claims: while out at a bar (on the evening he’d first meet his wife!), he
pointed out that many of the fancy new stylistic elements the other Netscape engineers were proposing wouldn’t work in Lynx, which is a text-only browser. The fanciest conceivable
effect that would work across both browsers would be making the text flash on and off, he joked. Then another engineer – who he doesn’t identify – pulled a late night hack session and
added it.
And so it was that when Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released in 1995 it added support for
the <blink> tag. Also animated GIFs and the first inklings of JavaScript, which collectively
would go on to define the “personal website” experience for years to come. Here’s how you’d use it:
<BLINK>This is my blinking text!</BLINK>
With no attributes, it was clear from the outset that this tag was supposed to be a joke. By the time HTML4 was
published as a a recommendation two years later, it was documented as being a joke. But the Web of the late 1990s
saw it used a lot. If you wanted somebody to notice the “latest updates” section on your personal home page, you’d wrap a <blink> tag around the title (or,
if you were a sadist, the entire block).
If you missed this particular chapter of the Web’s history, you can simulate it at Cameron’s World.
In the same year as Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released, Microsoft released Internet Explorer
2.0. At this point, Internet Explorer was still very-much playing catch-up with the features the Netscape team had implemented, but clearly some senior Microsoft engineer took a
look at the <blink> tag, refused to play along with the joke, but had an innovation of their own: the <marquee> tag! It had a whole suite of attributes to control the scroll direction, speed, and whether it looped or bounced backwards and forwards. While
<blink> encouraged disgusting and inaccessible design as a joke, <marquee> did it on purpose.
<MARQUEE>Oh my god this still works in most modern browsers!</MARQUEE>
But here’s the interesting bit: for a while in the late 1990s, it became a somewhat common practice to wrap content that you wanted to emphasise with animation in both a
<blink> and a <marquee> tag. That way, the Netscape users would see it flash, the IE users
would see it scroll or bounce. Like this:
<MARQUEE><BLINK>This is my really important message!</BLINK></MARQUEE>
Wrap a <blink> inside a <marquee> and IE users will see the marquee. Delightful.
The web has always been built on Postel’s Law: a web browser should assume that it won’t understand everything it reads,
but it should provide a best-effort rendering for the benefit of its user anyway. Ever wondered why the modern <video> element is a block rather than a self-closing
tag? It’s so you can embed within it code that an earlier browser – one that doesn’t understand <video> – can read (a browser’s default state when seeing a
new element it doesn’t understand is to ignore it and carry on). So embedding a <blink> in a <marquee> gave you the best of both worlds, right?
(welll…)
Wrap a <blink> inside a <marquee> and Netscape users will see the blink. Joy.
Better yet, you were safe in the knowledge that anybody using a browser that didn’t understand either of these tags could still read your content. Used properly, the
web is about progressive enhancement. Implement for everybody, enhance for those who support the shiny features. JavaScript and CSS can be applied with the same rules, and doing so pays dividends in maintainability and accessibility (though, sadly, that doesn’t stop people writing
sites that needlessly require these technologies).
Personally, I was a (paying! – back when people used to pay for web browsers!) Opera user so I mostly saw neither <blink> nor <marquee> elements.
I don’t feel like I missed out.
I remember, though, the first time I tried Netscape 7, in 2002. Netscape 7 and its close descendent are, as far as I can tell, the only web browsers to support both<blink> and <marquee>. Even then, it was picky about the order in which they were presented and the elements wrapped-within them. But support was
good enough that some people’s personal web pages suddenly began to exhibit the most ugly effect imaginable: the combination of both scrolling and flashing text.
If Netscape 7’s UI didn’t already make your eyes bleed (I’ve toned it down here by installing the “classic skin”), its simultaneous
rendering of <blink> and <marquee> would.
The <blink> tag is very-definitely dead (hurrah!), but you can bring it back with pure CSS if you must.
<marquee>, amazingly, still survives, not only in polyfills but natively, as you might be able to see above. However, if you’re in any doubt as to whether or not
you should use it: you shouldn’t. If you’re looking for digital nostalgia, there’s a whole
rabbit hole to dive down, but you don’t need to inflict <marquee> on the rest of us.
What this now does is instead of saying “add margin to the left”, it says “regardless of direction, put margin on the starting side”. If the language of the document was
right to left, like Arabic, that margin would be on the right hand side.
…
This is clever. If you use e.g. margin-left on every list element after the first to put space “between” them, the spacing isn’t quite right when the order of the elements
is reversed, for example because your page has been automatically translated into a language that reads in the opposite direction (e.g. right-to-left, rather than left-to-right). When
you use margin-left in this way you’re imposing a language-direction-centric bias on your content, and there’s no need: margin-inline-start and its friends
are widely-supported and says what you mean: “place a margin before this element”. I’ll be trying to remember to
use this where it’s appropriate from now on.
You see what that’s doing? It’s loading the stylesheet for the print medium, but then when the document finishes loading it’s switching the media type from “print” to “all”.
Because it didn’t apply to begin with the stylesheet isn’t render-blocking. You can use this to delay secondary styles so the page essentials can load at full speed.
Reducing blocking times, like I have on this page, is one of many steps in optimising perceived page performance.
I don’t like this approach. I mean: I love the elegance… I just don’t like the implications.
Why I don’t like lazy-loading CSS using Javascript
Using Javascript to load CSS, in order to prevent that CSS
blocking rendering, feels to me like it conceptually breaks the Web. It certainly violates the expectations of progressive enhancement, because it introduces a level of
fault-intolerance that I consider (mostly) unacceptable.
CSS and Javascript are independent of one another. A well-designed progressively-enhanced page should function with
HTML only, HTML-and-CSS only, HTML-and-JS only, or all
three.CSS adds style, and JS adds behvaiour to a page; and when
you insist that the user agent uses Javascript in order to load stylistic elements, you violate the separation of these technologies (I’m looking at you, the majority of heavyweight
front-end frameworks!).
If you’re thinking that the only people affected are nerds like me who browse with Javascript wholly or partially disabled, you’re wrong: gov.uk research shows that around 1% of your visitors have Javascript fail for some reason or another: because it’s disabled
(whether for preference, privacy, compatibility with accessibility technologies, or whaterver), blocked, firewalled, or they’re using a browser that you didn’t expect.
Can we lazy-load CSS in a way that doesn’t depend on Javascript? (spoiler: yes)
Chris’s daily tip got me thinking: could there exist a way to load CSS in a non-render-blocking way but which degraded
gracefully in the event that Javascript was unavailable? I.e. if Javascript is working, lazy-load CSS, otherwise: load
conventionally as a fallback. It turns out, there is!
In principle, it’s this:
Link your stylesheet from within a <noscript> block, thereby only exposing it where Javascript is disabled. Give it a custom attribute to make it easy to find
later, e.g. <noscript lazyload> (if you’re a standards purist, you might prefer to use a data- attribute).
Have your Javascript extract the contents of these <noscript> blocks and reinject them. In modern browsers, this is as simple as e.g.
[...document.querySelectorAll('noscript[lazyload]')].forEach(ns=>ns.outerHTML=ns.innerHTML).
If you need support for Internet Explorer, you need a little more work, because Internet Explorer doesn’t expose<noscript> blocks to the DOM in a helpful way. There are a variety of possible workarounds; I’ve implemented one but not put too much thought into it because I rarely have to
think about Internet Explorer these days.
In any case, I’ve implemented a proof of concept/demonstration if you’d like to see it in action: just take a look and view source (or read the page)
for details. Or view the source alone via this gist.
Lazy-loading CSS using my approach provides most of the benefits of other approaches… but works properly in environments without
Javascript too.
Update: Chris Ferdinandi’s refined this into an even cleaner approach that takes the best of both worlds.
Our sources report that the underlying reason behind the impressive tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 by Epic Games is to ridicule web developers.
According to the Washington Post, the tech demo includes a new dynamic lighting system and a rendering approach with a much higher geometric detail for both shapes and textures. For
example, a single statue in the demo can be rendered with 33 million triangles, giving it a truly unprecedented level of detail and visual density.
Turns out that the level of computational optimization and sheer power of this incredible technology is meant to make fun of web developers, who struggle to maintain 15fps while
scrolling a single-page application on a $2000 MacBook Pro, while enjoying 800ms delays typing the corresponding code into their Electron-based text editors.
…
Funny but sadly true. However, the Web can be fast. What makes it slow is bloated, kitchen-sink-and-all frontend frameworks, pushing computational effort to the browser with
overcomplicated DOM trees and unnecessarily rich CSS rules, developer
privilege, and blindness to the lower-powered devices that make up most of the browsing world. Oh, and of course embedding a million third-party scripts to get you all the analytics,
advertising, etc. you think you need doesn’t help, either.
The Web will never be as fast as native, for obvious reasons. But it can be fast; blazingly so. It just requires a little thought and consideration. I’ve talked about this recently.
The performance tradeoff isn’t about where the bottleneck is. It’s about who has to carry the burden. It’s one thing for a developer to push the burden onto a
server they control. It’s another thing entirely to expect visitors to carry that load when connectivity and device performance isn’t a constant.
…
This is another great take on the kind of thing I was talking about the other day: some developers who favour heavy frameworks (e.g.
React) argue for the performance benefits, both in development velocity and TTFB. But TTFB alone is not a valid metric of a user’s perception of an application’s performance: if you’re sending a fast payload that then requires extensive
execution and/or additional calls to the server-side, it stands to reason that you’re not solving a performance bottleneck, you’re just moving it.
I, for one, generally disfavour solutions that move a Web application’s bottleneck to the user’s device (unless there are other compelling reasons that it should be there, for example
as part of an Offline First implementation, and even then it should be done with care). Moving the burden of the bottleneck to the user’s device disadvantages those on slower or older
devices and limits your ability to scale performance improvements through carefully-engineered precaching e.g. static compilation. It also produces a tendency towards a thick-client
solution, which is sometimes exactly what you need but more-often just means a larger initial payload and more power consumption on the (probably mobile) user’s device.
Next time you improve performance, ask yourself where the time saved has gone. Some performance gains are genuine; others are just moving the problem around.
How manymoredevelopers have to point out how bloated we’ve made the web with our frameworks, tracking scripts, and other
3rd party solutions before we take things seriously? We’ve been banging on about this for ages. It’s like a plague!
And as Bridget goes on to say, it’s especially important at this unusual time, with many people confined to home and using the Internet to try to get accurate and up-to-date
information and resources (and sometimes overwhelming major websites), that performance, accessibility, and availability matters most.
There’ll be many lessons to learn from the coronavirus crisis. But these lessons aren’t just related to healthcare, or work, or supermarket logistics. No field will be left untouched.
And one of the things that I hope my field learns, when this is over, is the importance of things working even when things get tough. Test the sad paths, test your site under
heavy load, test your site with the CDNs simulated “down”, and develop accordingly. Because this isn’t the worst kind of
crisis we could face, and we have to be ready for the worse ones that could come.
Save your bandwidth: just look at this screenshot of the site instead of visiting.
Going to that page results in about 14 Mb of data being transmitted from their server to your device (which you’ll pay for
if you’re on a metered connection). For comparison, reading my recent post about pronouns results in about 356 Kb of data. In other words, their page is forty times more bandwidth-consuming, despite the fact that my page has about four times the word count. The page
you’re reading right now, thanks to its images, weighs in at about 650 Kb: you could still download it more than twenty times while
you were waiting for theirs.
Well that’s got to be pretty embarassing.
Worse still, the most-heavyweight of the content they deliver is stuff that’s arguably strictly optional and doesn’t add to the message:
Eight different font files are served from three different domains (the fonts alone consume about 140 Kb) – seven more are
queued but not used.
Among the biggest JavaScript files they serve is that of Hotjar analytics: I understand the importance of measuring your impact, but making
your visitors – and the planet – pay for it is a little ironic.
The biggest JavaScript file seems to be for Mapbox, which as far as I can see is never actually used: that map on the page is a static
image which, incidentally, I was able to reduce from 0.5 Mb to 0.2 Mb just by running it through
a free online image compressor.
This took me literally seconds to do but would save about a twelfth of a second for every single typical 4G user to their site. And it’s not even the worst culprit.
And because the site sets virtually no caching headers, even if you’ve visited the website before you’re likely to have to download the whole thing again. Every single
time.
It’s not just about bandwidth: all of those fonts, that JavaScript, their 60 Kb of CSS (this page sent you 13 Kb) all has to be parsed and interpreted by your device. If you’re on a mobile device or a laptop, that means you’re burning through lithium (a non-renewable resource whose extraction and disposal is highly polluting) and
regardless of your device you’re using you’re using more electricity to visit their site than you need to. Coding antipatterns like document.write() and active event
listeners that execute every time you scroll the page keep your processor working hard, turning electricity into waste heat. It took me over 12 seconds on a high-end smartphone and a
good 4G connection to load this page to the point of usability. That’s 12 seconds of a bright screen, a processor running full tilt,a data connection working its hardest, and a
battery ticking away. And I assume I’m not the only person visiting the website today.
This isn’t really about this particular website, of course (and I certainly don’t want to discourage anybody from the important cause of saving the planet!). It’s about the
bigger picture: there’s a widespread and long-standing trend in web development towards bigger, heavier, more power-hungry websites, built on top of heavyweight frameworks that push the
hard work onto the user’s device and which favour developer happiness over user experience. This is pretty terrible: it makes the Web slow, and brittle, and it increases the digital
divide as people on slower connections and older devices get left behind.
Using <input type="text" inputmode="numeric" pattern="[0-9]*"> allows for a degree of separation between how the user enters data (“input mode”), what the browser
expects the user input to contain (type equals number), and potentially how it tries to validate it.
…
I’ve sung the praises of the GDS research team before, and it’s for things like this that I respect them the most: they’re
knowing for taking a deep-dive user-centric approach to understanding usability issues, and they deliver valuable actionable answers off the back of it.
If you’ve got Web forms that ask people for numbers, this is how you should be doing it. If you’re doing so specifically for 2FA purposes, see that post I shared last month on a similar topic.
Don’t understand why Web accessibility is important? Need a quick and easily-digestible guide to the top things you should be looking into in order to make your web applications
screenreader ready? Try this fun, video-game-themed 5 minute video from Microsoft.
There’s a lot more to accessibility than is covered here, and it’s perhaps a little over-focussed on screenreaders, but it’s still a pretty awesome introduction.
I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the
IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish
notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and
reviews, for example.
But for people who subscribe (either directly or indirectly) to everything I post, I imagine it must be a little frustrating to sometimes be
unable to identify the type of a post before clicking-through. So I’ve added the following code, which I’m sharing here and on GitHub in case it’s of any use to anybody else, to my theme’s functions.php:
// Make titles in RSS feed be prefixed by the Kind of the post.functionadd_kind_to_rss_post_title(){
$kinds= wp_get_post_terms( get_the_ID(), 'kind' );
if( !isset( $kinds ) ||empty( $kinds ) ) return get_the_title(); // sanity-check.$kind=$kinds[0]->name;
$title= get_the_title();
return trim( "[{$kind}] {$title}" );
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'add_kind_to_rss_post_title', 4 ); // priority 4 to ensure it happens BEFORE default escaping filters.
This decorates the titles of my posts, but only in my feeds, so it’s easier for people to tell at-a-glance what’s going on:
Down the line I might expand this so that it doesn’t show if the subscriber is, for example, asking only for articles (e.g. via this
feed); I’m coming up with a huge list of things I’d like to do at IndieWebCamp London! But for now, this feels like a nice simple
improvement to a plugin I love that helps it to fit my specific needs.
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was.
And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with.
I’ve been taking for granted that most folks doing web stuff still remember those days, or at least the decade that followed, but I think that assumption might be a wee bit
out of date. Some time ago I encountered a tweet marvelling at what we had to do without
border-radius. I still remember waiting with bated breath for it to be unprefixed!
But then, I suspect I also know a number of folks who only tried web design in the old days, and assume nothing about it has changed since.
I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it.
(Please bear in mind that this post is a fine blend of memory and research, so I can’t guarantee any of it is actually correct, especially the bits about causality. You may
want to try the W3C’s history of CSS, which is considerably shorter,
has a better chance of matching reality, and contains significantly less swearing.)
(Also, this would benefit greatly from more diagrams, but it took long enough just to write.)
…
I too remember the bad-old days of the pre-CSS and early-CSS Web. Back
then, when we were developing for it, we thought that it was magical. We tolerated issues like having to copy-paste our navigation around a stack of static pages, manually change our
design all over the place etc…. but man… I wouldn’t want to go back to working that way!
This is an excellent long-read for an up-close-and-personal look at how CSS has changed over the decades. Well worth a look if
you’ve any interest in the topic.
