Registering service workers

In chapter two of Going Offline, I talk about registering your service worker wrapped up in some feature detection:

<script>
if (navigator.serviceWorker) {
  navigator.serviceWorker.register('/serviceworker.js');
}
</script>

But I also make reference to a declarative way of doing this that isn’t very widely supported:

<link rel="serviceworker" href="/serviceworker.js">

No need for feature detection there. Thanks to the liberal error-handling model of HTML (and CSS), browsers will just ignore what they don’t understand, which isn’t the case with JavaScript.

Alas, it looks like that nice declarative alternative isn’t going to be making its way into browsers anytime soon. It has been removed from the HTML spec. That’s a shame. I have a preference for declarative solutions where possible—they’re certainly easier to teach. But in this case, the JavaScript alternative isn’t too onerous.

So if you’re reading Going Offline, when you get to the bit about someday using the rel value, you can cast a wistful gaze into the distance, or shed a tiny tear for what might have been …and then put it out of your mind and carry on reading.

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.

Paris Web 2019 - 10 octobre après-midi - Amphithéâtre - YouTube

Here’s the livestream of the talk I gave at Paris Web—Going Offline, complete with French live-captioning and simultaneous interpretation in .

Offline Web Experiences with Jeremy Keith « CTRL+CLICK CAST

I had a great time chatting with Lea and Emily about service workers on this episode of their podcast—they’re such great hosts!

Here’s the huffduffed audio.

Friends Talk Frontend #26: Jeremy Keith (Part 1) on Huffduffer

Here’s the first part of a chat I had on Friends Talk Frontend about Resilient Web Design and Going Offline.

devMode.fm // Going Offline: Service Workers with Jeremy Keith

I talked for an hour about service workers ‘n’ stuff

(Also available on Huffduffer.)