Explore My Notes

Kasey mentioned this blog post in her talk yesterday. I wish I'd checked it out sooner, as it pretty much covers my notes from her (excellent) presentation but with greater clarity 👍 The perfect overview of the main WCAG 2.1 guidelines that all websites should strive to meet.

Oh dear. Tim's put together some actual numbers on the impact that using a frontend framework has on the user. As a proponent of the Jamstack, which pretty much has JavaScript frameworks at its core, these types of articles are always worrying, but they remain absolutely necessary information. So let's rip off the band-aid:

Sites with Angular ship 344% more JavaScript on desktop at the 10th percentile, and 377% more on mobile. Sites with React, the next heaviest, ship 193% more  JavaScript on desktop and 270% more on mobile devices.

Ouch 😢

Vue fares a little better, then comes jQuery (no real surprises there), with "vanilla" websites in the lead (again, not surprising; as Tim puts it, you can't start with JavaScript and expect to ship less). Thread times are similar, though here React is bottom of the pile by a clear margin:

React sites bring up the tail end, spending 248% more time on desktop devices and 658% more time on mobile devices. No, 658% is not a typo. At the 10th percentile, sites with React spend 2.7s on the main thread dealing with all the JavaScript sent down.

In comparison, Angular is rocking 230%-313% at the 10th percentile. This gets "better" as you begin looking at worse sites (i.e. the 90th percentile), but the overall trend persists and the numbers are still terrifying. At the tail-end, React sites are spending 20.8 seconds just parsing the JavaScript! Even more damning for React is that single-framework sites (which should perform better across the board) actually end up performing worse for the bottom 50%. Quite why is debatable, though Tim argues for site migrations meaning that some React sites are still offloading a lot of the work to jQuery, which remains more performant.

Worse still is how badly these framework-based websites perform on mobile.

Even at the 10th percentile, React sites spend 431.5% more time on the main thread on mobile devices as they do on desktop devices.

That's equivalent to over 10 seconds just to load the page properly... Still, whilst these results are even more damning than I would have predicted, there is room for hope. Tim is right in suggesting that vanilla JavaScript is the best alternative, but he also points to other technologies which could be a positive trade-off. More performant frameworks like Svelte and Preact help a lot; SSGs such as Gatsby, NuxtJS, and NextJS also give you massive savings (whew 😊).

He even points out that there are some forks and tools beginning to appear that simply strip all that JS out of the shipped site. For instance, the No JS Gatsby plugin looks pretty great; probably something worth experimenting on for this site.

Indonesia is a part of the world high on my "to visit" list. Between Komodo dragons, Homo floresiensis, the Wallace Line, and – of course – the delicious satay dishes, there's a lot that draws me to this region. Matt's write-up of his own trip is a little OTT at times, but it contains some useful information and a cracking itinerary. I had no idea that Borobodur was the biggest Buddhist temple in the world, for example.

Also, Matt notes this rather wonderful piece of folklore:

A long time ago, [the Dragon Princess] gave birth to twins, a human boy called Gerong and a female dragon called Ora. They separated at birth and reunited as adults in the forest, over a shared love of deer meat. Ever since then, the islanders have considered the Komodos their sacred ancestors and have lived in relative harmony with  them...

A fascinating breakdown of how the early web was forever changed by one of the first truly popular CMSs: MovableType. Most importantly, this is the likely culprit as to why so much of the web is now sorted chronologically, even though that may be a terrible model for what web pages actually are.

A wonderfully easy to navigate list of resources, tutorials, and guides for every stage of the web dev journey.

Though of course some people really do still rely on RSS readers, stubbornly adding an RSS feed to your blog, even in 2019, is a political statement.

A fascinating dive into the history of RSS. From the initial duel-creation of RDFSS and Scripting News format, to the perceived pre-bubble-burst concept that syndication was the future, until the present competing formats and slow recession out of view, it's very neatly put together. I think there's validity in the argument that RSS was always too "geeky for mainstream use" (something I also worry about with the IndieWeb movement, no matter how much I agree with it):

Regular people never felt comfortable using RSS; it hadn’t really been designed as a consumer-facing technology and involved too many hurdles; people jumped ship as soon as something better came along.

I certainly remember thinking, in the early days of Twitter, that this was clearly the evolutionary step that RSS needed (hah!). But it's a sad thing that, as the article concludes, these "single-author" silos are much easier to evolve and adapt than consensus-driven community efforts like RSS.

Just a really nice resource for trying to track down good areas to see the night sky or mess around with a little astrophotography.

The team behind the HTTP Archive do a fantastic job of analysing the web and 2019 is no exception. From JavaScript to accessibility, if you want to see how well we're doing as a community at standing up for our own ideals, implementing best practices, embracing new technologies, or just doing stuff in general, there aren't really any better resources.

It's not so much a resource as a resource of resources; a meta resource. Providing high-level overviews of complex topics and then linking out to more detailed deep dives or explanations (not all free, but all vetted). Fair to say if you're looking to understand a given topic about front-end development, this is a good place to start.

Mike Berners-Lee (yes, brother to that Berners-Lee) has carved out a real niche for himself as something of an authority on the complexities of the modern environmental movement, particularly when it comes to carbon footprint calculations. That's why it's exciting to see his name behind this new service. Pawprints will be a PWA (yep, they're going web-native - I wonder if his brother's influence 😁) and resource that helps people both track and understand their environmental impact. I'm still a little dubious as to how well this might work, but I'm also intrigued enough to have signed up to their waiting list.

I can't quite believe that The Oatmeal is turning ten years old. I definitely can't believe how excellent these 10 8 tips/thoughts on creativity are. I don't have any personal experience with #8, but the rest hit home hard. Creativity is Breathing is a particularly wonderful concept to take to heart. ♥

Very high level guide to getting webmentions on your website, tracking them, and automatically pinging linked sites when you post.