Google search is no friend to the indie web:
Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.
Imagine a world without hyperlinks or search:
Take WeChat as an example. It is home to the vast majority of China’s original writing, and yet:
- It doesn’t allow any external links;
- Its posts are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Baidu, and its own search engine is practically useless;
- You can’t check the author’s other posts if open the page outside of the WeChat app. In other words, each WeChat article is an orphan, not linked to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.
Search engine indexing is key to content discovery in the knowledge creation domain, but in a mobile-first world, it is extremely difficult to pull content across the walled gardens, whether or not there is a profit incentive to do so.
Again, the issue here is not censorship. Had China relaxed its speech restrictions, a search start-up would’ve faced the same level of resistance from content platforms when trying to index their content, and content platforms would’ve been equally reluctant to create their own search engines, as they could serve ads and profit without a functional search engine.
When I was speaking at conferences last year about service workers, I’d introduce the Cache API. I wanted some way of explaining the difference between caching and other kinds of storage.
The way I explained was that, while you might store stuff for a long time, you’d only cache stuff that you knew you were going to need again. So according to that definition, when you make a backup of your hard drive, that’s not caching …becuase you hope you’ll never need to use the backup.
But that explanation never sat well with me. Then more recently, I was chatting with Amber about caching. Once again, we trying to define the difference between, say, the Cache API and things like LocalStorage and IndexedDB. At some point, we realised the fundamental difference: caches are for copies.
Think about it. If you store something in LocalStorage or IndexedDB, that’s the canonical home for that data. But anything you put into a cache must be a copy of something that exists elsewhere. That’s true of the Cache API, the browser cache, and caches on the server. An item in one of those caches is never the original—it’s always a copy of something that has a canonical home elsewhere.
By that definition, backing up your hard drive definitely is caching.
Anyway, I was glad to finally have a working definition to differentiate between caching and storing.
A Chrome-only API for adding offline content to an index that can be exposed in Android’s “downloads” list. It just shipped in the lastest version of Chrome.
I’m not a fan of browser-specific non-standards but you can treat this as an enhancement—implementing it doesn’t harm non-supporting browsers and you can use feature detection to test for it.
Smart thinking from Sara to improve usability for keyboard users by using aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" to skip duplicate links:
A good rule of thumb for similar cases is that if you have multiple consecutive links to the same page, there is probably a chance to improve keyboard navigation by skipping some of those links to reduce the number of tab stops to one. The less tab stops, the better, as long as it does not worsen or compromise on other aspects of usability.
I’ve cautiously implemented this pattern now over on The Session where snippets of comments had both a title link and a “more” link going to the same destination.
Ben shares the secret of SEO. Spoiler: the villain turns out to be Too Much JavaScript. Again.
Time to Interactive (TTI) is the most impactful metric to your performance score.
Therefore, to receive a high PageSpeed score, you will need a speedy TTI measurement.
At a high level, there are two significant factors that hugely influence TTI:
- The amount of JavaScript delivered to the page
- The run time of JavaScript tasks on the main thread
A small but perfectly formed progressive web app. It’s a private, offline-first personal journal with no log-in and no server-stored data. You can read about the tech stack behind it:
Your notes are only stored on your device — they’re never sent to a server. You don’t even need to sign-in to use it! It works offline, so you can reflect upon your day on the slow train journey home.
As it turns out, some sites are much harder to archive than others. This article goes through the process of archiving traditional web sites and shows how it falls short when confronted with the latest fashions in the single-page applications that are bloating the modern web.
In what is quite likely the greatest, most poetic showdown since the Thrilla in Manila, Brighton and Hove of the United Kingdom beat Portland of the USA by one-thousandth of a point. Portland scored 8.1631, Brighton scored 8.1632. No really. Brighton is scientifically the most hipster city in the world. Just.
…a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in or sign up for Facebook. I will go out of my way to avoid linking to websites that are hostile to users with pop-overs. (For example, I’ve largely stopped linking to anything from Wired, because they have such an aggressive anti-ad-block detection scheme. Fuck them.)
Same.
Facebook forbids search engines from indexing Facebook posts. Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web.
And then there’s this:
And in the same way they block indexing by search engines, Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts.
This is a free online video course recorded by Jake a couple of years back. It’s got a really good step-by-step introduction to service workers, delivered in Jake’s typically witty way. Some of the details are a bit out of date, and I must admit that I bailed when it got to IndexedDB, but I highly recommend giving this a go.
There’s also a free course on web accessibility I’m planning to check out.
This example of using background sync looks like it’s specific to Twilio, but the breakdown of steps is broad enough to apply to many situations:
On the page we need to:
- Register a Service Worker
- Intercept the “submit” event for our message form
- Place the message details into IndexedDB, an in browser database
- Register the Service Worker to receive a “sync” event
Then, in the Service Worker we need to:
- Listen for sync events
- When a sync event is received, retrieve the messages from IndexedDB
- For each message, send a request to our server to send the message
- If the message is sent successfully, then remove the message from IndexedDB
And that’s it.
This move by Google to start executing some POST requests makes me very uneasy: the web is agreement and part of that agreement is that POST requests are initiated by the user.
A cute blog that uses ingenious diagrams to "make fun of some things and sense of others."