Weekly resources, Feb 18 2022 - Web Directions

Time flies, and already we’re 6+ weeks into 2020 2021 2022.

Last week we launched the program for Hover, our 100% CSS focussed conference. This week we added a few more speakers to the line-up, with just one more to announce.

If you work with CSS at all, it is going to be incredibly useful, so take a look at the program, and then register.

As I have written about a bit before, when, in response to COVID-19, we moved our focus to online conferences, right from the outset we thought it was important to think deeply about how online conferences should work, what could, and should be different with an online event compared with an in-person one.

Some of these ideas, in particular about logistics, I captured in a piece on slow conferences, where I adapted ideas from the slow movement (slow food being perhaps the best known incarnation)–”[doing] things in a more human, less frenetic manner”.

An area we focussed a lot on was what kind of content our conferences should deliver. Think about an in-person conference you might have been to, and the type of presentations there; typically there’s significant breadth, but typically too little real depth. A smorgasbord to continue the analogy, rather than degustation. But we felt there was the opportunity, indeed the necessity, of becoming more focussed, and going deeper. Which is how we ended up with 6 conferences across the year, each going into a specific area of front end development.

Which does make for a lot of content (80+ presentations in 2021), and much of research into these different areas of technology and practice.

With Lazy Load our front end performance focussed conference coming up in May, along with Henri Helvetica, our curator and MC, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this area of front end performance, and this week I’ve gathered together a few of the things I’ve seen recently that I feel are worth a look at.

Caching Header Best Practices

Simon Hearne is a Web Performance Consultant, who writes and speaks extensively on web performance. He recently published an extensive guide to Caching Headers, and how best to use them. Required reading.

How to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources: a Deep Dive

Render-blocking resources (CSS and potentially JavaScript) interrupt the critical rendering path of a web page, and so can have a significant impact on core web vitals like First Contentful Paint (FCP) (here’s a presentation from Google’s Annie Sullivan at Lazy Load last year giving a detailed overview of Core Web Vitals).

Sia Karamalegos goes deep into how to minimise the impact of render-blocking resources in this fantastic article.

The Web’s environmental impact

Way back in 2019 (it feels a lot longer than 3 years for some reason) Assim Hussein presented Save the World, one line at a time at our Code Leaders conference (you can watch that with a free Conffab account). Even as recently as then, the topic of the environmental impact of the Web was something almost no one spoke about. Thankfully this is starting to change.

One of the critiques of blockchain technologies as they stand, at least, relying as they do on proof of work, is they are incredibly wasteful of energy. But non-Web3 folks shouldn’t be all that smug, since the Web has estimates of up to 4% of all global carbon emissions associated with the internet.

Website performance and the planet

Fershad Irani wrote recently on the connection between website performance and climate change

For a bit of perspective, in a year the web as whole uses more electricity than the UK. The internet is annually responsible for emissions equivalent to Germany (the world’s 7th largest polluter). That’s more polluting than the civil aviation sector.

What can we do about it? Fershad has some great ideas (and includes a link to Web Site Carbon Calculator, where you can calculate the impact of your own website.)

Carbolytics

Carbolytics is a project at the intersection of art and research that aims to raise awareness and call for action on the environmental impact of pervasive surveillance within the advertising technology ecosystem (AdTech), as well as to provide a new perspective to address the social and environmental costs of opaque data collection practices

…

The research behind Carbolytics identifies and analyzes the carbon emissions of the total number of cookies belonging to the top 1 million websites. The investigation identified more than 21 million cookies per single visit to all these websites, belonging to more than 1200 different companies, which translates to an average of 197 trillion cookies per month, resulting in 11,442 monthly metric tonnes of CO2 emissions

These are precisely the sort of issues we’ll be covering at Lazy Load, so if they are of interest or importance to you, we’d love to see you there.