Earlier this month, Jeremy Keith posed the question: “How green is my server?”. As Jeremy notes, it’s surprisingly hard to get that information! So how do you ensure that you’re hosting your website on a green server?
Maybe when I wrote about performative performance? Michelle has a prime example:
The low carbon toggle does absolutely nothing.
In fact, worse than nothing. It doesn’t prevent images being downloaded. It doesn’t switch the site to dark mode, or prevent autoplaying animations (e.g. the hero carousel), or reduce resources transferred in other way. All it does is overlay an extra element with a background gradient on top of the large images on the site to give the appearance that those images being prevented from loading.
JavaScript doesn’t get executed on very old browsers when native syntax for new language features is encountered. However, thanks to GitHub being built following the principle of progressive enhancement, users of older browsers still get to interact with basic features of GitHub, while users with more capable browsers get a faster experience.
That’s the way to do it!
Concepts like progressive enhancement allow us to deliver the best experience possible to the majority of customers, while delivering a useful experience to those using older browsers.
Read on for the nitty-gritty details…
Smart advice on future-proofing and backward-compatibility:
There isn’t a single, specific device, browser, and person we cater to when creating a web experience. Websites and web apps need to adapt to a near-infinite combination of these circumstances to be effective. This adaptability is a large part of what makes the web such a successful medium.
Consider doing the hard work to make it easy and never remove feature queries and @supports statements. This creates a robust approach that can gracefully adapt to the past, as well as the future.
This is something I bump against over and over again: so-called evergreen browsers that can’t actually be updated because of operating system limits.
From what I could gather, the version of Chrome was tied to ChromeOS which couldn’t be updated because of the hardware. No new ChromeOS meant no new Chrome which meant stuck at version 76.
But what about the iPad? I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air. Apple stopped supporting that device in iOS 12, which means it was stuck with whatever version of Safari last shipped with iOS 12.
So I had two older browsers that couldn’t be updated. It was device obsolescence because you couldn’t install the latest browser.
Websites stop working and the only solution is to buy a whole new device.
Cassie’s enthusiasm for fun and interesting SVG animation shines through in her writing!
This is superbly in-depth and easy-to-follow article from Cassie—everything you need to know about motion paths in SVG and CSS! It’s worth reading just for the wonderful examples.
What a wonderfully in-depth and clear tutorial from Cassie on how she created the animation for her nifty SVG logo!
Also: Cassie is on the indie web now, writing on her own website—yay!
On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City.
Flickr Commons just keeps growing and growing. Now there are wonderful collections of pictures from Greenwich available for us all to peruse and tag.
I should be depressed and dispirited after reading this, but the sheer quality of the writing gives me hope.
See, I'm not the only one who thinks that this is what she's singing.
A micro campaign to get people using switched extension blocks, you know four ways, multi plug sockets, this kind of thing, with switches
Adam Greenfield encapsulates his ideas from Everyware for the audience at the LIFT conference earlier this year.
Adam Greenfield talks about his new book, Everyware: The Dawning of Ubiquitous Computing.
Spot the anachronism from the forthcoming movie, Good Night And Good Luck.
This, my friends, is the number of the beast.