Journal tags: gist

After writing about a declarative Web Share API here yesterday I thought I’d better share the idea (see what I did there?).

I opened an issue on the Github repo for the spec.

(I hope that’s the right place for this proposal. I know that in the past ideas were kicked around on the Discourse site for Web platform Incubator Community Group but I can’t stand Discourse. It literally requires JavaScript to render anything to the screen even though the entire content is text. If it turns out that that is the place I should’ve posted, I guess I’ll hold my nose and do it using the most over-engineered reinvention of the browser I’ve ever seen. But I believe that the plan is for WICG to migrate proposals to Github anyway.)

I also realised that, as the JavaScript Web Share API already exists, I can use it to polyfill my suggestion for:

<button type="share">

The polyfill also demonstrates how feature detection could work. Here’s the code.

This polyfill takes an Inception approach to feature detection. There are three nested levels:

1. This browser supports button type="share". Great! Don’t do anything. Otherwise proceed to level two.
2. This browser supports the JavaScript Web Share API. Use that API to share the current page URL and title. Otherwise proceed to level three.
3. Use a mailto: link to prefill an email with the page title as the subject and the URL in the body. Ya basic!

The idea is that, as long as you include the 20 lines of polyfill code, you could start using button type="share" in your pages today.

I’ve made a test page on Codepen. I’m just using plain text in the button but you could use a nice image or SVG or combination. You can use the Codepen test page to observe two of the three possible behaviours browsers could exhibit:

1. A browser supports button type="share". Currently that’s none because I literally made this shit up yesterday.
2. A browser supports the JavaScript Web Share API. This is Safari on Mac, Edge on Windows, Safari on iOS, and Chrome, Samsung Internet, and Firefox on Android.
3. A browser supports neither button type="share" nor the existing JavaScript Web Share API. This is Firefox and Chrome on desktop (and Edge if you’re on a Mac).

See the Pen Polyfill for button type=”share" by Jeremy Keith (@adactio) on CodePen.

The polyfill doesn’t support Internet Explorer 11 or lower because it uses the DOM closest() method. Feel free to fork and rewrite if you need to support old IE.

In chapter two of Going Offline, I talk about registering your service worker wrapped up in some feature detection:

<script>
if (navigator.serviceWorker) {
  navigator.serviceWorker.register('/serviceworker.js');
}
</script>

But I also make reference to a declarative way of doing this that isn’t very widely supported:

<link rel="serviceworker" href="/serviceworker.js">

No need for feature detection there. Thanks to the liberal error-handling model of HTML (and CSS), browsers will just ignore what they don’t understand, which isn’t the case with JavaScript.

Alas, it looks like that nice declarative alternative isn’t going to be making its way into browsers anytime soon. It has been removed from the HTML spec. That’s a shame. I have a preference for declarative solutions where possible—they’re certainly easier to teach. But in this case, the JavaScript alternative isn’t too onerous.

So if you’re reading Going Offline, when you get to the bit about someday using the rel value, you can cast a wistful gaze into the distance, or shed a tiny tear for what might have been …and then put it out of your mind and carry on reading.

I really, really like service workers. They’re one of those technologies that have such clear benefits to users that it seems like a no-brainer to add a service worker to just about any website.

The thing is, every website is different. So the service worker strategy for every website needs to be different too.

Still, I was wondering if it would be possible to create a service worker script that would work for most websites. Here’s the script I came up with.

The logic works like this:

• If there’s a request for an HTML page, fetch it from the network and store a copy in a cache (but if the network request fails, try looking in the cache instead).
• For any other files, look for a copy in the cache first but meanwhile fetch a fresh version from the network to update the cache (and if there’s no existing version in the cache, fetch the file from the network and store a copy of it in the cache).

So HTML files are served network-first, while all other files are served cache-first, but in both cases a fresh copy is always put in the cache. The idea is that HTML content will always be fresh (unless there’s a problem with the network), while all other content—images, style sheets, scripts—might be slightly stale, but get refreshed with every request.

My original attempt was riddled with errors. Jake came to my rescue and we revised the script into something that actually worked. In the process, my misunderstanding of how await works led Jake to write a great blog post on await vs return vs return await.

I got there in the end and the script seems solid enough. It’s a fairly simplistic strategy that could work for quite a few sites, but it has some issues…

Service workers don’t perform any automatic cleanup of caches—that’s up to you to do (usually during the activate event). This script doesn’t do any cleanup so the cache might grow and grow and grow. For that reason, I think the script is best suited for fairly small sites.

The strategy also assumes that a file will either be fetched from the network or the cache. There’s no contingency for when both attempts fail. So there’s no fallback offline page, for example.

I decided to test it in the wild, but I expanded it slightly to fix the fallback issue. The version on the Ampersand 2018 website includes a worst-case-scenario option to show a custom offline page that has been pre-cached. (By the way, if you haven’t got a ticket for Ampersand yet, get a ticket now—it’s going to be superb day of web typography nerdery.)

Anyway, this fairly basic script seems to be delivering some good performance improvements. If you’ve got a site that you think would benefit from this network/caching strategy, and it’s served over HTTPS, then:

1. Feel free to download the script or copy and paste it into a file called serviceworker.js,
2. Put that file in the root directory of your website,
3. Add this in a script element at the bottom of your HTML pages:

if (navigator.serviceWorker && !navigator.serviceWorker.controller) { navigator.serviceWorker.register('/serviceworker.js'); }

You can also use the script as a starting point. You might find issues specific to your particular website. That’s okay—you can tweak and adjust the script to suit your needs.

If this minimal service worker script proves in any way useful to you, thank Jake.