I wish more publishers and services took this approach to evaluating technology:
We scrutinize third-party services before including them in our articles or elsewhere on our site. Many include trackers or analytics that would collect data on our readers. These may be standard across much of the web, but we don’t use them.
Remy has an excellent improvement on that article I linked to yesterday on using srcdoc with iframes. Rather than using srcdoc instead of src, you can use srcdoc as well as src. That way you can support older browsers too!
This is a clever use of the srcdoc attribute on iframes.
Chris looks at all the different ways of working around the fact that HTML doesn’t do transclusion. Those ways include (hah!) Scott’s super clever technique and Trys’s little Sergey.
Scott writes up that super smart transclusion trick of his.
Woah! This is one smart hack!
Scott has figured out a way to get all the benefits of pointing to an external SVG file …that then gets embedded. This means you can get all the styling and scripting benefits that only apply to embedded SVGs (like using fill).
The fallback is very graceful indeed: you still get the SVG (just not embedded).
Now imagine using this technique for chunks of HTML too …transclusion, baby!
Anil documents the steady decline of empowering features from web browsers: view source; in-situ authoring; transclusion, but finishes with the greatest loss of all: your own website at your own address.
There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t post stupid memes to our own web address instead of on Facebook or Reddit. There are social barriers, of course — if we stubbornly used our own websites right now, none of our family or friends would see our stuff. Yet there’s been a dogged community of web nerds working on that problem for a decade or two, trying to see if they can get the ease or convenience of sharing on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to work across a distributed network where everyone has their own websites.
(Although it’s a bit of shame that Anil posted this on Ev’s blog instead of his own.)
This is very good news indeed—Google are going to allow non-AMP pages to get the same prioritised treatment as AMP pages …if they comply with the kind of performance criteria that Tim outlined.
It’ll take time to get there, but I’m so, so glad to see that Google aren’t going to try to force everyone to use their own proprietary format.
We are taking what we learned from AMP, and are working on web standards that will allow instant loading for non-AMP web content. We hope this work will also unlock AMP-like embeddability that powers Google Search features like the Top Stories carousel.
I just hope that this alternate route to the carousel won’t get lumped under the banner of “AMP”—that term has been pretty much poisoned at this point.
The slides from Richard's superb Skillswap presentation.
A handy little tool to turn video embedding markup into valid XHTML.