World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web (Part 1) – Smashing Magazine

World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web (Part 2) – Smashing Magazine

The second part of Bruce’s excellent series begins by focusing on the usage of proxy browsers around the world:

Therefore, to make websites work in Opera Mini’s extreme mode, treat JavaScript as an enhancement, and ensure that your core functionality works without it. Of course, it will probably be clunkier without scripts, but if your website works and your competitors’ don’t work for Opera Mini’s quarter of a billion users, you’ll get the business.

But how!? Well, Bruce has the answer:

The best way to ensure that everyone gets your content is to write real, semantic HTML, to style it with CSS and ensure sensible fallbacks for CSS gradients, to use SVG for icons, and to treat JavaScript as an enhancement, ensuring that core functionality works without scripts. Package up your website with a manifest file and associated icons, add a service worker, and you’ll have a progressive web app in conforming browsers and a normal website everywhere else.

I call this amazing new technique “progressive enhancement.”

You heard it here first, folks!

Faster Connectivity !== Faster Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.

Amen!

Move Fast & Don’t Break Things | Filament Group, Inc.

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!

Location, Privilege and Performant Websites

Testing on a <$100 Android device on a 3G network should be an integral part of testing your website. Not everyone is on a brand-new device or upgrades often, especially with the price point of a high-end phones these days.

When we design and build our websites with the outliers in mind, whether it’s for performance or even user experience, we build an experience that can be easy for all to access and use — and that’s what the web is about, access and information for all.

The Ethics of Performance - TimKadlec.com

When you stop to consider all the implications of poor performance, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that poor performance is an ethical issue.