The Best Of The Internets

Adaptive images & more land in Firefox 38!

This is getting to be a habit: Google is shuttering its PageSpeed service

This is a fantastic presentation from Patty Toland (of Filament Group), given at the Smashing Conference in Santa Monica.

ESPN launched its responsive site. I still need to tuck into it, but here’s a little background as to why:

In January, 61 percent of ESPN’s roughly 94 million users in the United States were viewing content exclusively on mobile devices, with a good chunk of that viewing content on its mobile web version. For a massive company like Disney trying to make a shift to mobile like any other content-driven company, a test of a new mobile web strategy for a large property like ESPN is critical.

Testing “new” tech isn’t really a new thing for ESPN. Those of you who have been on the web a while might remember it being one of the first really big sites to embrace CSS and web standards, back in 2003.

Coding HTML emails is one of those necessary evils, but Ted Goas offers some helpful advice and links in this post.

This is an open letter to designers and developers who’d rather not work on email.

And then it was revealed:

Windows["Microsoft Edge"] = new Browser();

I gotta believe the origins of the name go back to IE8’s “version targeting” scheme. Remember this?

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

A snarky, clever backhanded rant against the JavaScript-only crowd. Good for a chuckle:

They aren’t really on your site to read your article or check what time their train leaves - they’re really there to marvel at your buttery-smooth, hardware-accelerated 60fps animations and 1337 client-side javascript skillz that mean you can browse the entire site without ever once touching the server after the first page-load… just as long as you don’t mind that first page-load being 3MB in size, crapping out on unreliable mobile connections and taking whole seconds between DOM-ready and the UI actually appearing.

Yes. Yes it does. Some great stats in here including this gem:

O’Neill Clothing saw perhaps the most impressive increases after their conversion to mobile-ready. Transactions went up 112.50% on iPhones and 333.33% on Android. Conversions rang in at 65.71% on the iPhone and 407.32% on Android. Total revenue cleared 101.25% on iPhone and 591.42% on Android.

Wow.

Bruce Lawson is dead-on with his critique of Apple’s feedback on Web Components:

Implementation is hard. Too hard for the developers at Apple, it appears. So Web developers must faff around adding ARIA and tab index and keyboard listeners (so most won’t) and the inevitable consequence of making accessibility hard is that assistive technology users will suffer.

We (browser makers and web developers) need to be willing to put in the effort to make things better for everyone else. Sadly, few seem interested.

Thanks for calling this out Bruce!