Optimizing PWAs For Different Display Modes — Smashing Magazine
There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.
State of the gap
Remy looks at the closing gap between native and web. Things are looking pretty damn good for the web, with certain caveats:
The web is the long game. It will always make progress. Free access to both consumers and producers is a core principle. Security is also a core principle, and sometimes at the costs of ease to the developer (but if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun, right?).
That’s why there’ll always be some other technology that’s ahead of the web in terms of features, but those features give the web something to aim for:
Flash was the plugin that was ahead of the web for a long time, it was the only way to play video for heavens sake!
Whereas before we needed polyfills like PhoneGap (whose very reason for existing is to make itself obsolete), now with progressive web apps, we’re proving the philosophy behind PhoneGap:
If the web doesn’t do something today it’s not because it can’t, or won’t, but rather it is because we haven’t gotten around to implementing that capability yet.
Related links
Developing an alt text button for images on my website | James’ Coffee Blog
I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:
Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.
The orders of complexity of websites and what they imply for the design of web platform features
An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.
Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
Better typography with text-wrap pretty | WebKit
Everything you ever wanted to know about text-wrap: pretty in CSS.
Related posts
Aleth Gueguen is speaking at Web Day Out
Progressive web apps from the trenches.
Harry Roberts is speaking at Web Day Out
This line-up just gets better and better! You’ll want to be in Brighton on March 12th, 2026.
content-visibility in Safari
Safari 18 supports `content-visibility: auto` …but there’s a very niche little bug in the implementation.
The datalist element on iOS
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
Rotten Apple
Apple are planning to kill mobile web apps. This is not an exaggeration. We must stop them.