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

Service Workers | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi blogs every day about the power of vanilla JavaScript. For over a week now, his daily posts have been about service workers. The cumulative result is this excellent collection of resources.

Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs – A List Apart

Aaron outlines some sensible strategies for serving up images, including using the Cache API from your service worker script.

Offline Page Descriptions | Erik Runyon

Here’s a nice example of showing pages offline. It’s subtly different from what I’m doing on my own site, which goes to show that there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe when it comes to offline strategies.

Welcoming Progressive Web Apps to Microsoft Edge and Windows 10 - Microsoft Edge Dev BlogMicrosoft Edge Dev Blog

It’s really great to hear about how Microsoft will be promoting progressive web apps as first-class citizens …but it’s really unhelpful that they’re using this fudgy definition:

Progressive Web Apps are just great web sites that can behave like native apps—or, perhaps, Progressive Web Apps are just great apps, powered by Web technologies and delivered with Web infrastructure.

Although they also give a more technical definition:

Technologically speaking, PWAs are web apps, progressively enhanced with modern web technologies (Service Worker, Fetch networking, Cache API, Push notifications, Web App Manifest) to provide a more app-like experience.

Nice try, slipping notifications in there like that, but no. No, no, no. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that one of the most annoying “features” of native apps is even desirable on the web.

If you want to use notifications, fine. But they are absolutely not a requirement for a progressive web app.

(A responsive design, on the other hand, totally is.)

Progressive Web Apps - ILT  |  Web  |  Google Developers

A step-by-step guide to building progressive web apps. It covers promises, service workers, fetch, and cache, but seeing as it’s from Google, it also pushes the app-shell model.

This is a handy resource but I strongly disagree with some of the advice in the section on architectures (the same bit that gets all swoonsome for app shells):

Start by forgetting everything you know about conventional web design, and instead imagine designing a native app.

Avoid overly “web-like” design.

What a horribly limiting vision for the web! After all that talk about being progressive and responsive, we’re told to pretend we’re imitating native apps on one device type.

What’s really disgusting is the way that the Chrome team are withholding the “add to home screen” prompt from anyone who dares to make progressive web apps that are actually, y’know …webby.