WeedyGarden
I’ve just started digging into the report, but so far it looks very informative.
Our mission is to combine the raw stats and trends of the HTTP Archive with the expertise of the web community. The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web, backed by real data and trusted web experts. It is comprised of 20 chapters spanning aspects of page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution.
Great article by Matt Hobbs getting into the nitty-gritty of Web Page Test waterfall charts.
Over the weekend, Scott Jehl of the Filament Group workshopped an acronym that covers the “ideal qualities that I think we should… aspire to, when aiming to create excellent websites”.
Accessible, Secure, Performant, Inclusive, Responsive, and Ethical.
This month a couple of articles regarding displaying offline pages in a nice way were posted by Remy Sharp and Jeremy Keith. We’re doing something very similar on www.nd.edu, but since it an informational site and not a blog, it may be helpful to some to show the differences between their implementations and ours.
We were recently notified by a client that when he visited his department site from China, the site would take a very long time to load. Everything seemed fine on first inspection, so we tested the site using WebPageTest with the Beijing, China (Firefox) location. After waiting in a fairly long queue, one glance at the waterfall made the issue clear.
Google is pushing some “core updates” which they describe as “significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems”. Their advice to users should their site drop in rankings?
Focus on content
…pages that drop after a core update don’t have anything wrong to fix. This said, we understand those who do less well after a core update change may still feel they need to do something. We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.
Be sure to check out the full post for additional advice.
@xeenon covers the basics of supporting system-wide Dark Mode in Safari on iOS and macOS.
@dethbakin introduces the latest Safari iOS changes for web developers and evangelizes using RWD for all platforms.
Web specific content starts at 18:30.
“I want to convince you that you don’t need to know your content is on an iPad, you just need to use feature detection”
This is big news—it means developers now have more control over Google Fonts web font loading behavior. We can enforce instant rendering of fallback text (when using font-display: swap) rather than relying on the browser default behavior of invisible text for up to 3 seconds while the web font request is in-flight.
Zach Leatherman breaks down the basics of Google Fonts recent support for font-display. There are still some drawbacks, but it’s a definite improvment.
With the introduction of Dark Mode in macOS Mojave last year, web developers have been asking for support in Safari to style web content that matches the system appearance. With the Safari 12.1 update in macOS 10.14.4, dark mode support in WebKit has arrived.
Only available in Safari 12.1 so far, but worth getting up to speed on the basics.