Am I cached or not?

When I was writing about the lie-fi strategy I’ve added to adactio.com, I finished with this thought:

What I’d really like is some way to know—on the client side—whether or not the currently-loaded page came from a cache or from a network. Then I could add some kind of interface element that says, “Hey, this page might be stale—click here if you want to check for a fresher version.”

Trys heard my plea, and came up with a very clever technique to alter the HTML of a page when it’s put into a cache.

It’s a function that reads the response body stream in, returning a new stream. Whilst reading the stream, it searches for the character codes that make up: <html. If it finds them, it tacks on a data-cached attribute.

Nice!

But then I was discussing this issue with Tantek and Aaron late one night after Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf. I realised that I might have another potential solution that doesn’t involve the service worker at all.

Caveat: this will only work for pages that have some kind of server-side generation. This won’t work for static sites.

In my case, pages are generated by PHP. I’m not doing a database lookup every time you request a page—I’ve got a server-side cache of posts, for example—but there is a little bit of assembly done for every request: get the header from here; get the main content from over there; get the footer; put them all together into a single page and serve that up.

This means I can add a timestamp to the page (using PHP). I can mark the moment that it was served up. Then I can use JavaScript on the client side to compare that timestamp to the current time.

I’ve published the code as a gist.

In a script element on each page, I have this bit of coducken:

var serverTimestamp = <?php echo time(); ?>;

Now the JavaScript variable serverTimestamp holds the timestamp that the page was generated. When the page is put in the cache, this won’t change. This number should be the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 in the UTC timezone (that’s what my server’s timezone is set to).

Starting with JavaScript’s Date object, I use a caravan of methods like toUTCString() and getTime() to end up with a variable called clientTimestamp. This will give the current number of seconds since January 1st, 1970, regardless of whether the page is coming from the server or from the cache.

var localDate = new Date();
var localUTCString = localDate.toUTCString();
var UTCDate = new Date(localUTCString);
var clientTimestamp = UTCDate.getTime() / 1000;

Then I compare the two and see if there’s a discrepency greater than five minutes:

if (clientTimestamp - serverTimestamp > (60 * 5))

If there is, then I inject some markup into the page, telling the reader that this page might be stale:

document.querySelector('main').insertAdjacentHTML('afterbegin',`
  <p class="feedback">
    <button >dismiss</button>
    This page might be out of date. You can try <a href="javascript:window.location=window.location.href">refreshing</a>.
  </p>
`);

The reader has the option to refresh the page or dismiss the message.

It’s not foolproof by any means. If the visitor’s computer has their clock set weirdly, then the comparison might return a false positive every time. Still, I thought that using UTC might be a safer bet.

All in all, I think this is a pretty good method for detecting if a page is being served from a cache. Remember, the goal here is not to determine if the user is offline—for that, there’s navigator.onLine.

The upshot is this: if you visit my site with a crappy internet connection (lie-fi), then after three seconds you may be served with a cached version of the page you’re requesting (if you visited that page previously). If that happens, you’ll now also be presented with a little message telling you that the page isn’t fresh. Then it’s up to you whether you want to have another go.

I like the way that this puts control back into the hands of the user.

It’s Time to Build a Progressive Web App. Here’s How – The New Stack

Much as I appreciate the optimism of this evaluation, I don’t hold out much hope that people’s expectations are going to change any time soon:

Indeed, when given a choice, users will opt for the [native] app version of a platform because it’s been considered the gold standard for reliability. With progressive web apps (PWAs), that assumption is about to change.

Nonetheless, this is a level-headed look at what a progressive web app is, mercifully free of hand-waving:

• App is served through HTTPS.
• App has a web app manifest with at least one icon. (We’ll talk more about the manifest shortly.)
• App has a registered service worker with a fetch event handler. (More on this later too.)

Streets Series’ Articles - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

This is a really excellent four-part series on web performance that really dives into the technical details and asks all the right questions:

1. Making the world’s fastest website, and other mistakes
2. The weirdly obscure art of Streamed HTML
3. Speed Needs Design, or: You can’t delight users you’ve annoyed
4. Routing: I’m not smart enough for a SPA

How to make MPAs that are as fast as SPAs | Go Make Things

The headline is a little misleading because if you follow this advice, your multi-page apps will be much much faster than single page apps, especially when you include that initial page load of a single page app.

Here’s a quick high-level summary of what I do…

1. Serve pre-rendered, mostly static HTML.
2. Inline everything, including CSS and JavaScript.
3. Use mostly platform-native JavaScript, and as little of it as possible.
4. Minify and gzip all the things.
5. Lean heavily on service workers.

That’s an excellent recipe for success right there!

Progressier | Make your website a PWA in 42 seconds

This in an intriguing promise (there’s no code yet):

A PWA typically requires writing a service worker, an app manifest and a ton of custom code. Progressier flattens the learning curve. Just add it to your html template — you’re done.

I worry that this one line of code will pull in many, many, many, many lines of JavaScript.

Building a client side proxy

This is a great way to use a service worker to circumvent censorship:

After the visitor opens the website once over a VPN, the service worker is downloaded and installed. The VPN can then be disabled, and the service worker will take over to request content from non-blocked servers, effectively acting as a proxy.