This is the transcript of a brilliant presentation by Scott—read the whole thing! It starts with a much-needed history lesson that gets to where we are now with the dismal state of performance on the web, and then gives a whole truckload of handy tips and tricks for improving performance when it comes to styles, scripts, images, fonts, and just about everything on the front end.
Essential!
Aaron outlines some sensible strategies for serving up images, including using the Cache API from your service worker script.
The Web is smothering in useless images. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution because they take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight. They also slow down the site’s ability to download quickly.
If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.
A nice standalone tool for picking colours out of photos, and generating a colour palette from the same photo.
The title is somewhat misleading—currently it’s about native lazy-loading for Chrome, which is not (yet) the web.
I’ve just been adding loading="lazy" to most of the iframes and many of the images on adactio.com, and it’s working a treat …in Chrome.
Using IntersectionObserver to lazy load images—very handy for webmention avatars.
This is quite nifty: a fully-featured photo editing tool right in the browser, with no log-in or registration required.
Here’s a clever tiny lesson from Dave and Brad: you can use prefers-reduced-motion in the media attribute of the source element inside picture.
Page web bloat score (WebBS for short) is calculated as follows:
WebBS = TotalPageSize / PageImageSize
Yes, this is a tongue-in-cheek somewhat arbitrary measurement, but it’s well worth reading through the rationale for it.
How can the image of a page be smaller than the page itself?
A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.
This is …I mean …yes, but …it …I …
A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.
The loading attribute for images and iframes is coming to Chrome. The best part:
You can also use
loadingas a progressive enhancement. Browsers that support the attribute can get the new lazy-loading behavior withloading=lazyand those that don’t will still have images load.
I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.
He makes an interesting observation at the end:
However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.
Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, the vast majority of sites out there on the web are not being built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.
An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.
I love this idea of comparing human colour choices to those of a computer:
I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by “a computer” and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.
I also love that this was the biggest obstacle to finding representative imagery:
I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat.
Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.
Another bookmarklet for checking accessibility—kind of like tota11y—that allows to preview how screen readers will handle images, focusable elements, and more.
Well, this looks like it could come in handy—no more tedious time in Photoshop trying to select turn a person into a separate layer by hand; this does it for you.
Some tips for getting responsive images to work well on the Apple Watch:
- test your layouts down to 136-
pxwide- include
300w-ish resources in your full-widthimg’ssrcsets- art direct to keep image subjects legible
- say the magic
metawords