Link tags: badging

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

Chromium Blog: Moving towards a faster web

It’s nice to see that the Chrome browser will add interface enhancements to show whether you can expect a site to load fast or slowly.

Just a shame that the Google search team aren’t doing this kind of badging …unless you’ve given up on your website and decided to use Google AMP instead.

Maybe the Chrome team can figure out what the AMP team are doing to get such preferential treatment from the search team.

Badging API Explainer

Here’s an intriguing proposal that would allow web apps to indicate activity in an icon (like an unread count) in the same way that native apps can.

This is an interesting one because, in this case, it’s not just browsers that would have to implement it, but operating systems as well.

Dev.Opera — Making progressive web apps even better: ambient badging and “pop into browser”

Andreas demoed these ideas yesterday. Proper ambient badging and a way of getting at URLs even if a progressive web app is running in fullscreen or standalone mode. Great stuff!

PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet | Infrequently Noted

Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”