Jeremy Keith

Core web vitals from Google are the ingredients for an alphabet soup of exlusionary intialisms. But once you get past the unnecessary jargon, there’s a sensible approach underpinning the measurements.

From May—no, June—these measurements will be a ranking signal for Google search so performance will become more of an SEO issue. This is good news. This is what Google should’ve done years ago instead of pissing up the wall with their dreadful and damaging AMP project that blackmailed publishers into using a proprietary format in exchange for preferential search treatment. It was all done supposedly in the name of performance, but in reality all it did was antagonise users and publishers alike.

Core web vitals are an attempt to put numbers on user experience. This is always a tricky balancing act. You’ve got to watch out for the McNamara fallacy. Harry has already started noticing this:

A new and unusual phenomenon: clients reluctant (even refusing) to fix performance issues unless they directly improve Vitals.

Once you put a measurement on something, there’s a danger of focusing too much on the measurement. Chris is worried that we’re going to see tips’n’tricks for gaming core web vitals:

This feels like the start of a weird new era of web performance where the metrics of web performance have shifted to user-centric measurements, but people are implementing tricky strategies to game those numbers with methods that, if anything, slightly harm user experience.

The map is not the territory. The numbers are a proxy for user experience, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure intangible ideas like pain and frustration. As Laurie says:

This is 100% the downside of automatic tools that give you a “score”. It’s like gameification. It’s about hitting that perfect score instead of the holistic experience.

And Ethan has written about the power imbalance that exists when Google holds all the cards, whether it’s AMP or core web vitals:

Google used its dominant position in the marketplace to force widespread adoption of a largely proprietary technology for creating websites. By switching to Core Web Vitals, those power dynamics haven’t materially changed.

We would do well to remember:

When you measure, include the measurer.

But if we’re going to put numbers to user experience, the core web vitals are a pretty good spread of measurements: largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift, and first input delay.

(If you prefer using initialisms, remember that CFP is Certified Financial Planner, CLS is Community Legal Services, and FID is Flame Ionization Detector. Together they form CWV, Catholic War Veterans.)

An Event Apart Spring Summit is happening right now. I opened the show yesterday with a talk called The State Of The Web:

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I wrote about preparing this talk and you can see the outline on Kinopio. I thought it turned out well, but I never actually know until people see it. So I’m very gratified and relieved that it went down very well indeed. Phew!

Eric and the gang at An Event Apart asked for a round-up of links related to this talk and I was more than happy to oblige. I’ve separated them into some of the same categories that the talk covers.

I know that these look like a completely disconnected grab-bag of concepts—you’d have to see the talk to get the connections. But even without context, these are some rabbit holes you can dive down…

Apollo 8

• Earthrise by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Vimeo, 2018.
• Earthrise by Amanda Gorman on YouTube, 2018.
• They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them by Nadia Drake in National Geographic, 2018.
• Seeing the Whole Earth from Space Changed Everything by Ahmed Kabil for The Long Now Foundation, 2018.

Hypertext

• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic Monthly, 1945.
• The Demo by Douglas Engelbart, 1968.
• Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, 1989.

The World Wide Web

• proposed new tag: IMG by Marc Andreessen to www-talk, 1993.
• What is a Polyfill? by Remy Sharp, 2010.
• Stop solving problems you don’t yet have by Rachel Andrew, 2012.
• Re: More granularity for font-weight? by Håkon Wium Lie to www-style, 2015.
• Clean advertising on adactio.com, 2020.
• 2021 Predictions for UX and Front-End Experts (PDF) by Ire Aderinokun et al. for An Event Apart, 2021.

NASA

• Poppy Northcutt: The Woman Who Took Us to the Stars by Apriya Rai, 2020.
• Katherine Johnson Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly, 2020.
• Margaret Hamilton interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian, 2019.