Tag: Standards

All of the above are part of the same issue - a task is an incomplete and inaccurate cadence to measure main-thread blocking.

Alex is back at it with another very well written and important post, this time focusing on the state of mobile browser choice and how each major contributor is undermining user choice.

The mobile web is a pale shadow of its potential because the vehicle of progress that has delivered consistent gains for two decades has silently been eroded to benefit native app platforms and developers. These attacks on the commons have at their core a shared disrespect for the sanctity of user choice, substituting the agenda of app and OS developers for mediation by a user’s champion.

Apple’s iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store.

Heckuva leading assertion from Alex, but he brings some serious data to back it up, including some pretty compelling results from the Web Platform Tests.

There’s a lot of criticism levied at Chrome and how they move through the standards process (or don’t). Some of that criticism is fair, some of it isn’t.

But it’s pretty clear, I think, that we have a mismatch of resources creating an imbalance. On the one hand, we have Google funding the heck out of their web-focused efforts. On the other hand, we have Apple that just never seems willing to invest in it much.

The result isn’t particularly healthy for the web or for anyone who uses it. Alex’s point here rings true:

It’s perverse that users and developers everywhere pay a subsidy for Apple’s under-funding of Safari/WebKit development.

In this post, we’ll look at the new loading attribute which brings native <img> and <iframe> lazy-loading to the web!

Exciting to finally see this ship! Folks have been asking for a standards-based way to support lazy-loading images for years.

Gives me hope that maybe, someday, we’ll have element queries.

Jeremy has been thinking about when the ends justify the means, a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot as of late as well.

When do the ends justify the means? Isn’t the whole point of having principles that they hold true even in the direst circumstances? Why even claim that corporations shouldn’t influence politics if you’re going to make an exception for net neutrality? Why even claim that free speech is sacrosanct if you make an exception for nazi scum?

Those two examples are pretty extreme and I can easily justify the exceptions to myself. Net neutrality is too important. Stopping fascism is too important. But where do I draw the line? At what point does something become “too important?”

It’s a lovely post that connects dots between censorship, AMP, HTTPS as a requirement for new features and more.

Ethan was inspired by an Ursula Franklin lecture (I really have to read that book) to write a bit more about what we, as a community, can do about AMP. It looks a bit grim, as he points out.

And today, right now, I don’t think we need to look further than AMP to see an example of what Franklin’s talking about. As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google’s proprietary AMP standard, and against those of us who’d ask this question: What can I do about AMP?

But he goes on to point out that we can, and should, still speak up about our concerns and rally together:

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth speaking up, individually and collectively, and writing about our concerns. Quite the opposite. In fact, that’s why I signed an open letter on AMP, alongside twenty other concerned colleagues. (If you or your organization has a GitHub account, you can sign it, too.) Perhaps together, we can make the issue more visible, and make more people and organizations aware of our concerns. So while there might not be much I can do about AMP, maybe there’s something we can do.

Matt Griffin’s wonderful documentary about the web is now available to stream for free on Vimeo.