An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).
The slides from Aaron’s workshop at today’s PWA Summit. I really like the idea of checking navigator.connection.downlink and navigator.connection.saveData inside a service worker to serve different or fewer assets!
This in an intriguing promise (there’s no code yet):
A PWA typically requires writing a service worker, an app manifest and a ton of custom code. Progressier flattens the learning curve. Just add it to your html template — you’re done.
I worry that this one line of code will pull in many, many, many, many lines of JavaScript.
This is a great way to use a service worker to circumvent censorship:
After the visitor opens the website once over a VPN, the service worker is downloaded and installed. The VPN can then be disabled, and the service worker will take over to request content from non-blocked servers, effectively acting as a proxy.
Chris Ferdinandi blogs every day about the power of vanilla JavaScript. For over a week now, his daily posts have been about service workers. The cumulative result is this excellent collection of resources.
So, why would you want to use a service worker? Here are some cool things you can do with it.
Chris lists some of the ways a service worker can enhance user experience.
Debugging an error message.
The browser equivalent of a Roman legion showing up in a space opera.
Kiss your service workers goodbye on iOS.
The h-entry microformat and the Cache API are a perfect pairing for offline pages.
A little performance boost for your network-first service worker strategy.