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Every website and web app should have a service worker | Go Make Things

Needless to say, I agree with this sentiment.

I’ve worked with a lot of browser technology over the years. Service workers are pretty mind-blowing.

minimum interesting service worker

An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).

Baldur Bjarnason -

This is kind of brilliant:

Maybe what’s needed for websites and web apps is a kind of Prepper Web Dev?

The computer built to last 50 years | ploum.net

A fascinating look at what it might take to create a truly sunstainable long-term computer.

Add a Service Worker to Your Site | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Damn, I wish I had thought of giving this answer to the prompt, “What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”

If you do nothing else, this will be a huge boost to your site in 2022.

Chris’s piece is a self-contained tutorial!

Getting Started with PWAs [Workshop]

The slides from Aaron’s workshop at today’s PWA Summit. I really like the idea of checking navigator.connection.downlink and navigator.connection.saveData inside a service worker to serve different or fewer assets!

Progressier | Make your website a PWA in 42 seconds

This in an intriguing promise (there’s no code yet):

A PWA typically requires writing a service worker, an app manifest and a ton of custom code. Progressier flattens the learning curve. Just add it to your html template — you’re done.

I worry that this one line of code will pull in many, many, many, many lines of JavaScript.

Service Workers | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi blogs every day about the power of vanilla JavaScript. For over a week now, his daily posts have been about service workers. The cumulative result is this excellent collection of resources.

The amazing power of service workers | Go Make Things

So, why would you want to use a service worker? Here are some cool things you can do with it.

Chris lists some of the ways a service worker can enhance user experience.

Indexing your offline-capable pages with the Content Indexing API

A Chrome-only API for adding offline content to an index that can be exposed in Android’s “downloads” list. It just shipped in the lastest version of Chrome.

I’m not a fan of browser-specific non-standards but you can treat this as an enhancement—implementing it doesn’t harm non-supporting browsers and you can use feature detection to test for it.

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

Round 1: post your ideas / designs · Issue #1 · works-offline/logo

This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.

Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.

This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.

Local First, Undo Redo, JS-Optional, Create Edit Publish - Tantek

Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.

How creating a Progressive Web App has made our website better for people and planet

Creating a PWA has saved a lot of kilobytes after the initial load by storing files on the device to reuse on subsequent requests – this in turn lowers the load time and carbon footprint on subsequent page views, making the website better for both people and planet. We’ve also enabled offline access, which significantly improves user experience for people in areas with patchy connections, such as mobile users on their commute.

Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs – A List Apart

Aaron outlines some sensible strategies for serving up images, including using the Cache API from your service worker script.

Jotter

Here’s a super simple little note-taking app from Andy that works offline. Add to your home screen and away you go:

Jotter is a helpful little notepad that’ll save your notes offline, automatically for you as you type.

PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.

But bear in mind:

Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.

Link tags: offline

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