Tags: metadata

17

sparkline

Tuesday, June 29th, 2021

Safari 15

If you download Safari Technology Preview you can test drive features that are on their way in Safari 15. One of those features, announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, is coloured browser chrome via support for the meta value of “theme-color.” Chrome on Android has supported this for a while but I believe Safari is the first desktop browser to add support. They’ve also added support for the media attribute on that meta element to handle “prefers-color-scheme.”

This is all very welcome, although it does remind me a bit of when Internet Explorer came out with the ability to make coloured scrollbars. I mean, they’re nice features’n’all, but maybe not the most pressing? Safari is still refusing to acknowledge progressive web apps.

That’s not quite true. In her WWDC video Jen demonstrates how you can add a progressive web app like Resilient Web Design to your home screen. I’m chuffed that my little web book made an appearance, but when you see how you add a site to your home screen in iOS, it’s somewhat depressing.

The steps to add a website to your home screen are:

  1. Tap the “share” icon. It’s not labelled “share.” It’s a square with an arrow coming out of the top of it.
  2. A drawer pops up. The option to “add to home screen” is nowhere to be seen. You have to pull the drawer up further to see the hidden options.
  3. Now you must find “add to home screen” in the list
  • Copy
  • Add to Reading List
  • Add Bookmark
  • Add to Favourites
  • Find on Page
  • Add to Home Screen
  • Markup
  • Print

It reminds of this exchange in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:

“You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.”

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a torch.”

“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look you found the notice didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of The Leopard.’”

Safari’s current “support” for adding progressive web apps to the home screen feels like the minimum possible …just enough to use it as a legal argument if you happen to be litigated against for having a monopoly on app distribution. “Hey, you can always make a web app!” It’s true in theory. In practice it’s …suboptimal, to put it mildly.

Still, those coloured tab bars are very nice.

It’s a little bit weird that this stylistic information is handled by HTML rather than CSS. It’s similar to the meta viewport value in that sense. I always that the plan was to migrate that to CSS at some point, but here we are a decade later and it’s still very much part of our boilerplate markup.

Some people have remarked that the coloured browser chrome can make the URL bar look like part of the site so people might expect it to operate like a site-specific search.

I also wonder if it might blur “the line of death”; that point in the UI where the browser chrome ends and the website begins. Does the unified colour make it easier to spoof browser UI?

Probably not. You can already kind of spoof browser UI by using the right shade of grey. Although the removal any kind of actual line in Safari does give me pause for thought.

I tend not to think of security implications like this by default. My first thought tends to be more about how I can use the feature. It’s only after a while that I think about how bad actors might abuse the same feature. I should probably try to narrow the gap between those thoughts.

Monday, April 19th, 2021

My current HTML boilerplate - Manuel Matuzović

This is a great HTML boilerplate, with an explanation of every line.

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate

This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song

This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.

Monday, December 2nd, 2019

HEAD - A free guide to `head` elements

A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.

Tuesday, October 29th, 2019

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search

Google’s pissing over HTML again, but for once, it’s not by making up rel values:

A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “data-nosnippet” HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements.

This is a direct contradiction of how data-* attributes are intended to be used:

…these attributes are intended for use by the site’s own scripts, and are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Offline listings

This is brilliant technique by Remy!

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.

Saturday, August 31st, 2019

PWA asset generator based on Puppeteer.

Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.

A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Structured data and Google

Bruce wonders why Google seems to prefer separate chunks of JSON-LD in web pages instead of interwoven microdata attributes:

I strongly feel that metadata that is separated from the user-visible data associated with it highly susceptible to metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. User-visible text is also developer-visible text. When devs copy/ paste that, it’s very easy to forget to copy any associated metadata that’s not interleaved, leading to errors.

Friday, September 1st, 2017

Categories land in the Web App Manifest | Aaron Gustafson

Manifest files can have categories now. Time to update those JSON files.

Friday, December 30th, 2016

Data on the Web Best Practices

This document provides Best Practices related to the publication and usage of data on the Web designed to help support a self-sustaining ecosystem. Data should be discoverable and understandable by humans and machines.

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016

ManifeStation - Automagically create your Web App Manifest

If you’re going to make a manifest file for an existing site, start with this very handy tool. You give it the URL of your site and it then parses the content for existing metadata to create a best first stab at a manifest JSON file.

Tuesday, December 1st, 2015

A Little Less Metacrap - Broken Links

Peter writes a follow-up to my post on metadata markup pointing out that Twitter will fall back to Open Graph values.

Saturday, November 28th, 2015

Metadata markup

When something on your website is shared on Twitter or Facebook, you probably want a nice preview to appear with it, right?

For Twitter, you can use Twitter cards—a collection of meta elements you place in the head of your document.

For Facebook, you can use the grandiosely-titled Open Graph protocol—a collection of meta elements you place in the head of your document.

What’s that you say? They sound awfully similar? Why, no! I mean, just look at the difference. Here’s how you’d mark up a blog post for Twitter:

<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://adactio.com/journal/9881">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Metadata markup">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="So many standards to choose from.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://adactio.com/icon.png">

Whereas here’s how you’d mark up the same blog post for Facebook:

<meta property="og:url" content="https://adactio.com/journal/9881">
<meta property="og:title" content="Metadata markup">
<meta property="og:description" content="So many standards to choose from.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://adactio.com/icon.png">

See? Completely different.

Okay, I’ll attempt to dial down my sarcasm, but I find this wastage annoying. It adds unnecessary complexity, which in turn, I suspect, puts a lot of people off even trying to implement this stuff. In short: 927.

We’ve seen this kind of waste before. I remember when Netscape and Microsoft were battling it out in the browser wars: Internet Explorer added a proprietary acronym element, while Netscape added the abbr element. They both basically did the same thing. For years, Internet Explorer refused to implement the abbr element out of sheer spite.

A more recent example of the negative effects of competing standards was on display at this year’s Edge conference in London. In a session on front-end data, Nolan Lawson decried the fact that developers weren’t making more use of the client-side storage options available in browsers today. After all, there are so many to choose from: LocalStorage, WebSQL, IndexedDB…

(Hint: if developers aren’t showing much enthusiasm for the latest and greatest API which is sooooo much better than the previous APIs they were also encouraged to use at the time, perhaps their reticence is understandable.)

Anyway, back to metacrap.

Matt has written a guide to what you need to do in order to get a preview of your posts to appear in Slack. Fortunately the answer is not yet another collection of meta elements to place in the head of your document. Instead, Slack piggybacks on the existing combatants: oEmbed, Twitter Cards, and Open Graph.

So to placate both Twitter and Facebook (with Slack thrown in for good measure), your metadata markup is supposed to look something like this:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@adactio">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://adactio.com/journal/9881">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Metadata markup">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="So many standards to choose from.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://adactio.com/icon.png">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://adactio.com/journal/9881">
<meta property="og:title" content="Metadata markup">
<meta property="og:description" content="So many standards to choose from.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://adactio.com/icon.png">

There are two things on display here: redundancy, and also, redundancy.

Now the eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted a crucial difference between the Twitter metacrap and the Facebook metacrap. The Twitter metacrap uses the name attribute on the meta element, whereas the Facebook metacrap uses the property attribute. Technically, there is no property attribute in HTML—it’s an RDFa thing. But the fact that they’re using two different attributes means that we can squish the meta elements together like this:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@adactio">
<meta name="twitter:url" property="og:url" content="https://adactio.com/journal/9881">
<meta name="twitter:title" property="og:title" content="Metadata markup">
<meta name="twitter:description" property="og:description" content="So many standards to choose from.">
<meta name="twitter:image" property="og:image" content="https://adactio.com/icon.png">

There. I saved you at least a little bit of typing.

The metacrap situation is even more ridiculous for “add to homescreen”/”pin to start”/whatever else browser makers can’t agree on…

Microsoft:

<meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="https://adactio.com" />
<meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=800;height=600">
<meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="Kill me now...">

Apple:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="https://adactio.com/icon.png">

(Repeat four or five times with different variations of icon sizes, and be sure to create icons with new sizes after every. single. Apple. keynote.)

Fortunately Google, Opera, and Mozilla appear to be converging on using an external manifest file:

<link rel="manifest" href="https://adactio.com/manifest.json">

Perhaps our long national nightmare of balkanised metacrap is finally coming to an end, and clearer heads will prevail.

Wednesday, November 18th, 2015

Manifest generator

A handy tool for helping you generate a JSON manifest file for your site. You’ll need one of those if you want Android devices to provide an “add to home screen” prompt.

Monday, June 4th, 2012

I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howling Wolf in just 25 moves. | Chloe Weil

The way that Chloe has catalogued her music over time is fascinating. It’s like the Long Now opposite of This Is My Jam.

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

The trouble with font classifications | Clagnut § Design thinking · Typography

Richard would like your help. Take a few minutes to run through a card-sorting exercise to help classify fonts in a more meaningful way.