The Best Of The Internets

It seems like the Android team and the Chrome team were not on the same page and Android Oreo (a.k.a., Android 8) undermines some critical features of Progressive Web Apps. As Maximiliano is quick to point out, most of these are easily fixable in a software update, so there’s not a whole lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth needed, but you should still be aware of how the experience differs from what users saw on the previous release.

In particular, I am hating the mini-Chrome icon overlay. For normal Homescreen bookmarks, I’m willing to let it go, but if a site has a Web App Manifest, it should look like any other app.

This is great to see! I think link[rel="canonical"] is not used often enough. I’d love to see all sharing protocols adopt this approach for things like cross-posts, m-dot sites, and more.

This is an interesting proposal. It’s a shame the map element is already taken.

This is a wonderful walkthrough of how Cloud Four progressively enhanced their site into a Progressive Web App over a six-month period.

I was originally interested in AMP, but the shine has work off. I’m turning it off as well.

Here’s Alex’s Follow up: One Month Without AMP.

It’s both key and often forgotten: “The browser statistics that matter are the browser usage statics of your web site, and nobody else’s”.

I love how accessible this article makes the idea of progressively enhancing layouts. Great job Manuel!

Val makes this concept very easy to understand.

Some interesting ideas here.

I won’t say “I want my internet back,” because that’s a myth of an innocent past that was never all that innocent. But it’s high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry—in particular, the certainty of ISP extortion as new services pay to get into the “fast lane.”

Grid is awesome, except when it isn’t.