This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do.
The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways.
Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!
This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?
Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.
Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.
Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:
At its core,
form-saveris a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values inlocalStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.
People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to:
Compression is when you feed a large language model something big that you want to make small. Summarise this book. Give me the gist of this meeting. Large language models are generally pretty good at this, which makes sense given that they themselves are kind of like compressed artifacts.
Transformation is when large language models convert from one format into another. Turn this audio into text. Turn this jumble of data into structured JSON. A large language model can handle these tasks pretty well. There’ll probably be a few errors so make sure that’s not a deal-breaker.
Expansion is when you give a large language model a prompt to generate something from scratch. An image. A presentation. An email. A poem. This is where slop lives. The output inevitably betrays its origins, glistening with a sheen of mediocrity.
Laurie spotted this three-way split a while back:
Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.
I hope that when the bubble finally bursts, we’ll see the surviving large language models put to work on the first two categories. The boring stuff. The work that’s tedious for humans.
But tedious is as tedious does. Something I consider drudgery might be the very thing that gives you life. Like Giles says:
I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.
The big exception seems to be programming. Apparently there are plenty of coders who never before expressed an interest in being managers who are now happily hanging up their coding spurs in favour being the overseer of non-human workers.
It’s a reasonable outlook. It could even be considered a user-centred approach. Users don’t care about the elegance of your code; they care about accomplishing their tasks.
Programming is something of an exception to the efficacy of large language models in general. Instead of relying on the subjectivity of painting, poetry, or prose, programming can be objectively tested. Throw enough money at the worst people in the world and they’ll give you tokens you can use to get the machines to test their own output. So you can get a large language model to create something reasonably good from scratch as long as that something is code.
If you had asked me about the threat model of large language models two years ago, I probably would’ve been worried for artists, writers, and musicians. I thought that software had enough inherent complexity to be relatively safe.
Now my opinion has completely reversed. Software is almost certainly the killer app for large language models.
I think the artists, writers, and musicians will be okay, or at least as okay as they ever were. It turns out that humans like things made by other humans.
And y’know what? If I had to choose which endeavour I’d rather see automated away—programming or art—it’s no competition.
Don’t get me wrong—it would be nice if everyone got paid for doing what they enjoy. It’s just that I’m okay with software engineers not being at the front of that line.
I remember when I first started getting paid money to make websites. “Really?” I thought, “Someone is willing to pay me to do something I’d do anyway?” I kept waiting for the jig to be up. Instead I saw my profession grow and expand.
Perhaps there’s a long-overdue compression happening.
Or maybe it’s more like a transformation.
I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?
A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.
I mean, I would ask for the country first (because not all countries have zip/postal codes), but the point stands…
The Session has been online in some form since the late 1990s. That’s long before web fonts existed.
To begin with, Times New Roman was the only game in town if you wanted serif type on a website. When Microsoft introduced Georgia it was a godsend. A beautiful typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the screen. I put it right at the start of my font stack for The Session.
Later, web fonts came along. Boy, does that short sentence belie the drama! There were very heated discussions about whether web browsers should provide this ability at all, and what it would mean for type foundries.
Microsoft led the way with their prorietary EOT format. Then everyone agreed on WOFF. Finally we got WOFF2, Electric Boogaloo.
Perhaps more important than that, we got intermediaries. Typekit, Fontdeck, and then the big daddy, Google Fonts.
That’s pretty much the state of play today. Oh yeah, and we’ve got variable fonts now.
I remember Nick Sherman presenting the idea of variable fonts at an Ampersand event years ago. I remember thinking “great idea, but it’ll never happen.” Pure science fiction. I thought the same thing when I first saw a conference presentation about a miraculous image format called Scalable Vector Graphics.
Sometimes I like to stop and take stock of what we take for granted in web browsers now. Web fonts. Variable web fonts. SVG. Flexbox. Grid. Media queries. Container queries. Fluid typography. And I haven’t even mentioned how we were once limited to just 216 colours on the web.
Given all the advances in web typography, you might be wondering how my font strategy for The Session changed over the years.
It didn’t.
I mean, sure, I added fluid typography. That was a natural extension of my love for liquid layouts and, later, responsive design. But the font stack itself? That was still Georgia all the way.
Y’see, performance has always been a top priority for The Session. If I was going to replace a system font with a web font that the user had to download, it really needed to be worth it.
Over the years I dabbled with different typefaces but none of them felt quite right to me. And I still think Georgia is a beautiful typeface.
“But your website will look like lots of other websites!” some may cry. That used to be true when all we had was system fonts. But now that web fonts have become the norm, it’s actually pretty unusual to see Georgia in the wild.
Recently I found a font I liked. Part of why I like it is that it shares a lot of qualities with Georgia. It’s Lora by Olga Karpushina and Alexei Vanyashin.
I started to dabble with it and began seriously contemplating using it on The Session.
It’s a variable font, which is great. But actually, I’m not using that many weights on The Session. I could potentially just use a non-variable variety. It comes in fixed weights of regular, medium, semibold, and bold.
Alas, the regular weight (400) is a bit too light and the medium weight (500) is a bit too heavy. My goldilocks font weight is more like 450.
Okay, so the variable font it is. That also allows me to play around with some subtle variations in weights. As the font size gets bigger for headings, the font weight can reduce ever so slightly. And I can adjust the overall font weight down in dark mode (there’s no grading feature in this font, alas).
Lora supports a lot of alphabets, which is great—quite a few alphabets turn up on The Session occasionally. But this means that the font file size is quite large. 84K.
Subsetting to the rescue!
I created a subset of Lora that has everything except Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Extended-B. I created another subset that only has Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Extended-B. Now I’ve got two separate font files that are 48K and 41K in size.
I wrote two @font-face declarations for the two files. They’ve got the same font-family (Lora), the same font-weight (400 700), and the same font-style (normal) but they’ve got different values for unicode-range. That way, browsers know to only use appropriate file when characters on the page actually match the unicode range.
The first file is definitely going to be used. The second one might not even be needed on most pages.
I want to prioritise the loading of that first subsetted font file so it gets referenced in a link element with rel="preload".
As well as file size, my other concern was how the swapping from Georgia to Lora would be perceived, especially on a slow connection. I wanted to avoid any visible rejiggering of the content.
This is where size-adjust comes in, along with its compadres ascent-override and descent-override.
Rather than adjusting the default size of Lora to match that of Georgia, I want to do it the other way around; adjust the fallback font to match the web font.
Here’s how I’m doing it:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Fallback for Lora';
src: local('Georgia');
size-adjust: 105.77%;
ascent-override: 95.11%;
descent-override: 25.9%;
}
And then my font stack is:
font-family: Lora, 'Fallback for Lora', Georgia, serif;
It’s highly unlikely that any device out there has a system font called “Fallback for Lora” so I can be pretty confident that the @font-face adjustment rules will only get applied to browsers that have the right local font, Georgia.
But where did those magic numbers come from for size-adjust, ascent-override, and descent-override?
They came from Katie Hempenius. As well as maintaing a repo of font metrics, she provides the formula needed to calculate all three values. Or you could use this handy tool to eyeball it.
With that, Georgia gets swapped out for Lora with a minimum of layout shift.
Even with the layout shift taken care of, do I want to serve up web fonts to someone on a slow connection?
It depends. Specifically, it depends on whether it’s their first time visiting.
The Session already treats first time visitors differently to repeat visitors. The first time you visit the site, critical CSS is embedded in the head of the HTML page instead of being referenced in an external style sheet. Only once the page has loaded does the full style sheet also get downloaded and cached.
I decided that my @font-face rules pointing to the web fonts are not critical CSS. If it’s your first time visiting, those CSS rules only get downloaded after the page is done loading.
And unless you’re on a fast connection, you won’t see Georgia get swapped out for Lora. That’s because I’ve gone with a font-display value of “optional”.
Most people use “swap”. Some people use “fallback”. You’ve got to be pretty hardcore to use “optional”.
But the next page you go to, or the next time you come to the site, you more than likely will see Lora straight away. That’s because of the service worker I’ve got quietly putting static assets into the Cache API: CSS, JavaScript, and now web fonts.
So even though I’m prioritising snappy performance over visual consistency, it’s a trade-off that only really comes into play for first visits.
I’m pretty happy with the overall strategy. Still, I’m not going to just set it and forget it. I’ll be monitoring the CRUX data for The Session keeping a particular eye on cumulative layout shift.
Before adding web fonts, the cumulative layout shift on The Session was zero. I think I’ve taken all the necessary steps to keep it nice and low, but if I’m wrong I’ll need to revisit my strategy.
Update: Big thanks to Roel Nieskens—of Wakamai Fondue fame—who managed to get the file size of my main subsetted font down even further; bedankt!
In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve used the web install API in production. Specifically, I’ve used it on The Session. In order to do that, I had to register for the origin trial.
I’ve just signed up for another origin trial. This time it’s for the proposed focusgroup attribute:
The
focusgroupHTML attribute is a proposed declarative way to add keyboard arrow-key navigation to composite widgets such as toolbars, tablists, menus, listboxes, etc. without writing any roving-tabindex JavaScript. One attribute replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate.
I’ve got an HTML web component on The Session called tab-controls. And yes, there’s a bunch of code in there to listen for keyboard events and respond appropriately. I would very much like to rip that code out.
So now that I’ve opted into the origin trial, I’ve added this to my HTML:
<tab-controls role="tablist" focusgroup="tablist">
If this focusgroup attribute takes off, I’ll be able to remove the role attribute but for now, it’s very much needed.
In the JavaScript for my tab-controls custom element, I need to be able to detect support for focusgroup. Here’s how I’m doing it:
if (!this.focusgroup) {
// do all my key handling stuff here
}
Here’s the important thing: don’t use getAttribute('focusgroup') to test for browser support. That will return true if the attribute is in the HTML. But the attribute will only get converted into a property if the browser understands it.
Jake has a lot more detail on the differences between attributes and properties.
Anyway, I figured I’d share that little snippet in case you too were interested in trying out the focusgroup proposal using progressive enhancement.
I have websites in my dock on my computer. I have websites on the home screen of my phone. When I open these websites from the dock or from the home screen, they behave just like native apps. It’s brilliant!
But knowing that you can add a website to the dock or to the home screen remains arcane knowledge. If you don’t know it’s possible, most web browsers aren’t going to tell you it’s an option. As a site owner, you pretty much have to explain to your users what they can do.
Lately it feels like there’s been some movement to change this situation. Or, at the very least, there’s been some discussion.
As a site owner, what you want is a way for someone visiting your site to press a button to initiate the process of adding the site to the dock or the home screen.
From what I can see from the discussion, there are two contenders for how to do this: BeforeInstallPromptEvent versus navigator.install.
I’ve used both APIs in production, so I’d like to offer my balanced feedback on both:
BeforeInstallPromptEvent sucks.navigator.install rocks.To add more detail…
The BeforeInstallPromptEvent API relies on you capturing and delaying an event that may or not fire at all.
Based on some arbitrary heuristics, Chrome—for example—will prompt the user to install the current website. This easily-dismissable prompt looks indistinguishable from a prompt to sign up to a newsletter or grant permission for cookies, so most people dismiss it. The idea with BeforeInstallPromptEvent is that you capture that prompt, prevent it from prompting, and then release it when you think it’s an appropriate time.
If you think it takes mental gymnastics to understand that, just imagine what it’s like trying to implement it!
The whole thing rests on this flawed idea of an install prompt being shown when certain conditions are met. Other browser vendors rightly point out that users should be able to install any website they want. Ideally it should have a manifest file. But making a service worker a requirement is a step too far (and I say that as someone who literally wrote a book about service workers).
Contrast that with the Web Install API, AKA navigator.install.
Based on a user interaction—like a click on a button—the browser initiates the installation process. The user still has to confirm they want to do this, of course. You know how geolocation or web notifactions work? It’s like that. You can’t trigger any of those APIs without the user’s permission.
That’s it. No contest.
It would be absolutely wonderful if more browsers supported navigator.install. It would be a pain in the ass if they decided to support BeforeInstallPromptEvent instead.
We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation.
The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.
We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?
Some neat CSS from Tess that’s a great example of progressive enhancement; these book covers look good in all browsers, but they look even better in some.
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.
Safari, Chrome, and Edge all allow you to install websites as though they’re apps.
On mobile Safari, this is done with the “Add to home screen” option that’s buried deep in the “share” menu, making it all but useless.
On the desktop, this is “Add to dock” in Safari, or “Install” in Chrome or Edge.
Firefox doesn’t offer this functionality, which as a shame. Firefox is my browser of choice but they decided a while back to completely abandon progressive web apps (though they might reverse that decision soon).
Anyway, being able to install websites as apps is fantastic! I’ve got a number of these “apps” in my dock: Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, The Session, Google Calendar, Google Meet. They all behave just like native apps. I can’t even tell which browser I used to initially install them.
If you’d like to prompt users to install your website as an app, there’s not much you can do other than show them how to do it. But that might be about to change…
I’ve been eagerly watching the proposal for a Web Install API. This would allow authors to put a button on a page that, when clicked, would trigger the installation process (the user would still need to confirm this, of course).
Right now it’s a JavaScript API called navigator.install, but there’s talk of having a declarative version too. Personally, I think this would be an ideal job for an invoker command. Making a whole new install element seems ludicrously over-engineered to me when button invoketarget="share" is right there.
Microsoft recently announced that they’d be testing the JavaScript API in an origin trial. I immediately signed up The Session for the trial. Then I updated the site to output the appropriate HTTP header.
You still need to mess around in the browser configs to test this locally. Go to edge://flags or chrome://flags/ and search for ‘Web App Installation API’, enable it and restart.
I’m now using this API on the homepage of The Session. Unsurprisingly, I’ve wrapped up the functionality into an HTML web component that I call button-install.
Here’s the code. You use it like this:
<button-install>
<button>Install the app</button>
</button-install>
Use whatever text you like inside the button.
I wasn’t sure whether to keep the button element in the regular DOM or generate it in the Shadow DOM of the custom element. Seeing as the button requires JavaScript to do anything, the Shadow DOM option would make sense. As Tess put it, Shadow DOM is for hiding your shame—the bits of your interface that depend on JavaScript.
In the end I decided to stick with a regular button element within the custom element, but I take steps to remove it when it’s not necessary.
There’s a potential issue in having an element that could self-destruct if the browser doesn’t cut the mustard. There might be a flash of seeing the button before it gets removed. That could even cause a nasty layout shift.
So far I haven’t seen this problem myself but I should probably use something like Scott’s CSS in reverse: fade in the button with a little delay (during which time the button might end up getting removed anyway).
My connectedCallback method starts by finding the button nested in the custom element:
class ButtonInstall extends HTMLElement {
connectedCallback () {
this.button = this.querySelector('button');
…
}
customElements.define('button-install', ButtonInstall);
If the navigator.install method doesn’t exist, remove the button.
if (!navigator.install) {
this.button.remove();
return;
}
If the current display-mode is standalone, then the site has already been installed, so remove the button.
if (window.matchMedia('(display-mode: standalone)').matches) {
this.button.remove();
return;
}
As an extra measure, I could also use the display-mode media query in CSS to hide the button:
@media (display-mode: standalone) {
button-install button {
display: none;
}
}
If the button has survived these tests, I can wire it up to the navigator.install method:
this.button.addEventListener('click', async (ev) => {
await navigator.install();
});
That’s all I’m doing for now. I’m not doing any try/catch stuff to handle all the permutations of what might happen next. I just hand it over to the browser from there.
Feel free to use this code if you want. Adjust the code as needed. If your manifest file says display: fullscreen you’ll need to change the test in the JavaScript accordingly.
Oh, and make sure your site already has a manifest file that has an id field in it. That’s required for navigator.install to work.
An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:
Extend HTML to do things automatically!
He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.
Almost two months ago, I put out the call for speaker suggestions for Web Day Out. I got some good responses—thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.
The response that really piqued my interest was from Aleth Gueguen. She proposed a talk on progressive web apps, backed up with plenty of experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfect it would be for Web Day Out.
So I’m very pleased to announce that Aleth will be speaking at Web Day Out about progressive web apps from the trenches:
Find out about the most important capabilities in progressive web apps and how to put them to work.
I’m really excited about this line-up! This is going to be a day out that you won’t want to miss. Get your ticket for a mere £225+VAT if you haven’t already!
Every engineer eventually overbuilds something. You think you’re being smart. You’re thinking ahead, building for growth and before you know it, you’ve created a system ten times heavier than your actual problem. That’s the trap. We keep designing for imaginary futures for scale that may never come and call it engineering. But it’s not engineering. It’s over-engineering.
The industry rewards it too. Nobody gets promoted for keeping things small and sane. You get promoted for complexity.